The envelope was too thin. Wright turned the letter over without opening it, feeling it for some valence, and then he set it against a browning bunch of bananas on the kitchen counter, thinking he should eat something first, having skipped the meal after his shift. He had woken that day with an unusual happiness, a feeling like having a friend in town, someone whose joy would come in observing routines, the idiosyncrasies of a bad lock, the beautiful broken idioms of the man at the corner store. Everything—weather, the walk to work—had transpired alongside some witty commentary upon it, but the feeling was gone the moment the call came, erased. Stoplights were invisible on the walk home. Other people were cardboard cutouts.
He chose a record in no hurry, he diced an onion with his back turned to the envelope. When it had pearled in the skillet he turned off the flame and wiped down the counter and began to bark, stuffing the side of his palm in his mouth as he bent weeping over the sink. It had been the wrong thing to ever write, he thought, a vote against his easier future.
As he attacked the envelope the leftmost third ripped, and so reading it he had to hold the two pieces together. There was a bus passing he could hear and he wanted to be on it, there was clean air outside and he needed to be in it. Vincent Kahn’s letter was brief, all capitals, all right angles.
DEAR MR. FERN,
HELLO.
THANK YOU FOR WRITING.
YOUR MOTHER WAS A VERY INTERESTING PERSON.
I DID NOT KNOW HER FOR LONG.
IF YOU ARE EVER IN OHIO WE CAN MEET FOR LUNCH.
—VK
HE TOLD BRADEN THE LIE first, thinking in doing so he was making it something else, a decision not contingent on a brief letter from a famous man. A drive to New York, he said, maybe a move, he wasn’t sure. They were sitting in the living room passing a smoldering roach back and forth, holding it by a glittery bobby pin of unknown provenance. In the corner of the room their Christmas tree remained, strung with popcorn and cranberries they’d threaded on a little coke on a Tuesday, tucked into it some cardboard New Year’s glasses that read 1986.
“You’re joking,” Braden said. “You worked so hard for your life here.”
“It’s too small a city. If I wanted to know everybody’s business, I’d move to the suburbs and read all the classifieds. I want to meet someone who doesn’t know anything about who I am.”
“Who are you?”
“Stop it.”
“I mean it,” he said. “What is it about who you are that’s keeping you from staying here?”
“Don’t you think taking this personally would be beneath you? I’m not saying permanent, I’m saying I’d peek my head in, and besides I’d stop in Ohio on the way. California’s not the only place. California’s a lie we tell ourselves to feel better.”
The smoke in the room made the conversation feel more casual than it was, an extension of any of the thousand they’d started but not finished, the time they’d travel to given the choice, half-recalled history lessons, an argument about the pretensions of Jacques Rivette or the sex appeal of Michael Keaton.
“Don’t you think ‘taking it personally’ is a term invented by sociopaths to shame everyone else for having very normal feelings? When has my personhood not been affected by the world’s action upon it? When did you become such an ice cube?”
“There’s nothing I’m ashamed of that’s keeping me from staying. But aren’t you tired of walking into a room and having everybody know exactly how you became what you are? Don’t you like the idea of getting to present yourself?”
“Traveling is a fool’s paradise, et cetera.” Braden waved some smoke from his face.
“I don’t really think Emerson applies here. It’s easy to feel superior about your identity when you’re sitting in a caned chair alone on a pond. It’s easy to say that changing the environment is a superficial fix, but also, no transcendentalist I’m aware of ever ironed out his sexuality for an audience over the course of years.”
“He’s going to let you down.”
This Braden said quietly, a part of his exhale on the last possible drag.
“What?”
His feet crossed on the table, Braden wouldn’t repeat it and he wouldn’t say anything else.
“There’s nothing I expect,” Wright said. “So how could he?”
Braden shook his head and set the bobby pin on the rim of the ashtray. He was testing him with silence, a dare Wright always lost. His voice sounded like Randy’s, and he thought his body felt as Randy’s must have, nothing about it liquid—all springs, all metal. He remembered Texas, he remembered gravel. The heat map of the body the day after a fight.
“No response at all? You’ll just leave me with that hopeful message?”
Rubbing a hand on his locked jaw, Braden stood and left. In his bed that night through the French doors Wright heard him in the next room, a two-part cough that seemed to correct itself on the throatier downbeat. Wright heard him sleep but never got there himself, and at five he gave up and made coffee, took his book and the French press down to the filthy stoop. He watched a man pulling a shopping cart of possessions uphill, stopping twice to rearrange the system of tarp and bungee cords, each time losing a few inches to the slickness of fog on the sidewalk.
At six thirty he stood by the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen, the letter in his left hand, his mother’s ring dull on the pinky of his right as he pecked out the numbers, thinking he could hear more of his body than you were supposed to, the breath but also the blood. The seventh digit, the ninth. There was something he was owed, or there was something he’d forgotten. When it rang he put the phone back on the cradle, then picked it up and pressed redial, glad to hear the sequence relayed evenly, the space between all parts the same.
“This is Vincent,” the voice said, a greeting that stunned him in how it answered the first question he’d prepared.
“This is Wright.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Wright.”
“I’m sorry, what is? This is Vincent. To whom am I speaking?”
“This is Wright. Fern. This is Fay Fern’s son, Wright.”
The pause felt like the time spent trapped in a rotating door, the air that felt pressurized, the silence that held you hostage.
“Of course. What time is it where you are?”
“Excuse me?”
“What time zone?”
“California.”
“Pacific Standard, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Weather there okay?”
“What, it’s—well, you can’t see anything until the fog burns off, and that’s about noon. It’s forty now.”
They were speaking about the temperature, he thought, and he ground the heel of his hand into a closed eye until he saw splintering reds. A second passed, three, time he didn’t pass through but that hung from him. In a strange coincidence I’m going to be passing through Ohio, he understood he was saying, a lie that landed flat-footed. The call became a gas station atlas, routes that connected and didn’t, are you writing this down he asked and Wright lied again. At the close of a phone call that was over in three minutes, Vincent Kahn spoke the name of an Irish pub franchise and a day and a time and then they repeated it to each other, the first thing on which they could agree.
In the days that were left he slipped a check for rent under a magnet on the fridge and rode his bicycle farther than he ever had, out to the seaside remains of the public baths that had burned in the sixties, and he walked the lines of the old foundations like a kid, hands out to either side. His last morning he spent seated at the foot of Braden’s bed, already dressed and showered, reading the headlines aloud and the corresponding article if a thumbs-up appeared from under the comforter. It had been their ritual for years, the Morning News, they called it.
WINNIE MANDELA CRITICIZES REAGAN. REAGAN HOLDS FIRM ON TAXES. By nine the light had turned milky and he stood up.
“Go back to sleep,” he said.