Richard Russo
Even in the dim light of the crowded tavern, Tana’s flaming red hair was a beacon. Making my way toward it, I wondered—and not for the first time—what would happen in the not too distant future when it began to gray. Red like that didn’t come in a bottle. Would she grow dull by degrees or wink out all at once, like a lighthouse flame?
Sliding in next to her, I said, “How’d you manage to snag the best booth in the joint?” It was the last week of classes and the place was heaving.
“Good things,” she said, studying my gruesome injury without visible sympathy, “happen to good people.” And bad things: well, no need to say it. “That,” she continued, “is one big-ass ugly eye.”
I ignored her and poured myself a beer from the sweating pitcher in the middle of the table. “Where’s what’s-his-name?”
“Guess.”
“Already?” I said. “You’ve been here, what? Fifteen minutes?”
“He has the bladder control of a sixty-year-old woman with ten kids.”
Right on cue the men’s room door swung open and Bobby, dressed in jeans and a threadbare tweed jacket over his favorite T-shirt—the one that read, I Shaved My Balls for This?—emerged, drying his hands on his jeans. Evidently the Sweet Spot’s men’s room was out of paper towels again. Until recently there’d been a hand drier in there, but it had fritzed and when it went unrepaired somebody’d yanked it out of the wall. The hole it left was one of many, though the others were all smaller and fist-shaped. The Spot was the sort of dive bar that was popular with both grad students and bikers, two groups that in southern Florida were not as mutually exclusive as they were most other places. Punching the men’s room wall wasn’t even particularly discouraged here, though when you did you were supposed to sign your name beneath the hole. Perhaps because a Sharpie had been thoughtfully provided for this purpose—it dangled from a string that had been tied to the handle of a wall urinal—a surprising number of people did. Come August, in preparation for the new academic year, the wall would be re-Sheetrocked and plastered over, and the process of its destruction would commence all over again.
“You want to sit next to your wife?” I said when Bobby arrived.
“Not particularly,” he said, cocking his head for a better look at my eye.
“Don’t start,” I warned him. “I’m in no fucking mood.”
“Jesus, Guy,” he said. “You should definitely see somebody.”
“It’ll heal.”
“Yeah, but the thing is?” he said. “It’s your whole head that needs examining, not just your eye. A bar fight? At your age?” I couldn’t help grinning at him. There were really only two kinds of people in the world: those who believe what you tell them and those who don’t. Bobby belonged to the first category.
Turning to his wife, who was definitely in the second, I said, “I could’ve sworn I warned him not to start.”
She shrugged, as if to say, Welcome to my world.
“Did you win, at least?” Bobby wanted to know.
“Winning isn’t everything,” I told him. “The important thing is to compete.”
“In other words you got your ass kicked.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t a fair fight.”
“How so?”
“She outweighed me by a hundred pounds, easy.” This did elicit a grudging smile.
“Poor baby,” Tana said, causing me to rotate and face her again. “How did it start? Was she wearing a MAGA hat?”
“Can we change the subject?”
“Sure,” she said, fixing me now. “Where’s Cloe?”
“Visiting her mother.”
“Wait,” Bobby said, shaking his head vigorously, as if it contained a rattle. “Isn’t her mother . . .”
“Dead?” I said, turning back to him. Because yeah, she was. “Why do you have to find fault with every single thing I say? Can’t we just sit here quietly and drink beer? Celebrate the weekend?”
“It’s only Thursday.”
“We’re academics. No one signs up for Friday classes.”
“When I was an undergraduate,” he recalled nostalgically, “there were Saturday classes. Remember those?”
“No, really,” Tana said. “Where’s Cloe?”
“Are you sure you don’t want to sit next to her?” I said to her husband. The trouble with half-moon booths was that whoever occupies the middle seat gets ganged up on. “I feel like my head’s on a swivel.”
He ignored this. “So, what’d you do? Go someplace else after we left here?” Clearly his feelings were hurt.
“What? I’m not allowed to drink except with you?”
“Okay, but you told us you were heading home. You said—”
“Maybe I enjoy lying to you,” I suggested. “Did you ever think of that? I mean, what do I do for a living?”
Tana nudged me in the ribs. “Now I remember what I wanted to ask.”
“What’s that?”
“Where’s Cloe?”
“How should I know? Text her.”
“I did. She isn’t responding.”
I feigned surprise at this. “She turned in her grades this morning. She could be on a flight to Madrid, for all I know.”
“Really?” Bobby said. “She’s all done?”
“What can I tell you? Tennis coaches don’t have a lot of exams to grade.”
Clearly dispirited, he shook his head. “I’ve still got two batches of portfolios.”
I snorted. “Poetry.”
“Don’t sneer. I hate it when you sneer.”
“Okay, but describe a typical portfolio,” I said. “What would it contain? Like, three sonnets? A hundred words total?”
Bobby, pointing his index finger at me, appealed to his wife. “And he wonders why people punch him.”
“Poor baby,” Tana said again, this time massaging my shoulders. “So many, many words he has to read! How big and thick his portfolios are compared to our puny ones! It’s not fair! He should earn much, much more money than we do!”
“I do earn more money than you do.”
She abruptly left off the massage. “Only because those Hollywood idiots keep renewing that movie option,” My first novel, published decades earlier, had gotten some attention at the time. A producer had offered an option on it, then promptly lost interest. He dutifully continued to renew it every year, though, a small annuity I had gotten used to.
“Plus he owns this place,” Bobby reminded her.
I didn’t of course, but every fall he and Tana told a fresh crop of grad students that I did, and because my name is Guy Sweet and this was our go-to watering hole, most of them believed it, never mind my repeated denials.
“Actually,” said Bobby, pointing, “aren’t those your students over there?”
“Hard to tell with just the one good eye,” I said, but sure enough, there on the other side of the tavern sat most of my Wednesday evening seminar.
“Oh, look!” Tana said, doing her best Sally Field. “They’re waving, Guy! They like you! They really like you!”
“Next year,” I said, raising my glass in their direction, “we’re going to have to find a new place to drink.”
“God,” Tana groaned, Sally Field vanishing as quickly as she’d appeared. “Another year here. I don’t want to think about it.”
“Oh, come on,” her husband said. “It’s not so bad.”
She ignored this as if he hadn’t spoken. “Here’s a thought! Maybe global warming is worse than we imagined. Maybe by next fall the whole university will be underwater.”
Bobby was shaking his head. “Remember how happy we were when we landed these jobs?”
“Why would I want to be reminded of that?”
“We came here as newlyweds. All our poet friends were jealous because we had tenure-track jobs. They said we had life by the balls.”
“Whereas the opposite proved true.”
“Yeah, but when was the last time a poet ever had life by the balls?” I pointed out.
“Let me think,” Tana said, pretending to take the question seriously. “Rod McKuen?”
Her husband sighed. “Happiness is a choice, is what I’m saying.”
Tana put her index finger in her mouth and made a gagging sound.
“Also a pursuit,” I added, “along with life and liberty. Not to mention a constitutional right. Some would even say a responsibility.”
“Well,” Bobby said, more to his wife than to me, “I choose to be happy.”
“Fine,” she told him. “Do that.”
It occurred to me that they might actually be having a serious discussion.
“Professor Sweet?” said a nearby voice, startling me. Laura from my seminar. Turns out one-eyed men are easy to sneak up on. “Could I have a word?”
I consulted my watch. One of my few rules: twenty-four hours must elapse between when a student’s work is critiqued in class and when they can meet with me to discuss it. Back when I instituted that regulation I was still young and green enough to believe that nobody could stay pissed off for more than a day. By my calculation only twenty-two hours had elapsed, which meant I’d be within my rights to put her off until tomorrow. On the other hand, it was the end of the semester and she didn’t appear angry. She did look like she might cry, though, which would be just as bad.
Bobby must’ve come to the same conclusion, because he rose gallantly. “Slide in,” he offered. “I have to visit the gents anyway.”
Tana looked at the ceiling. “You’ve got to be joking.”
Bobby ignored this, nodding significantly at Laura and me. “Don’t you have to . . .”
“Pee? No,” she told him, herself sliding out of the booth now. “I might vomit, though.”
At this Bobby sighed even more mightily. “Tana . . .”
“I’m not saying I will, just that I might,” she told him. “Think of it as a choice. Like happiness.”
When they were gone, Laura, the most earnest and anxious of my students, said, “Do you think she was serious?”
“I’ve never known her to be.”
She looked relieved, but then, really taking me in, she immediately became anxious again. “That looks really painful.”
“Eh,” I shrugged, though in fact the eye was throbbing to the beat of my respiration.
“Is it true?” Laura was saying. “That you were in a bar fight?”
“Nah, that’s just what I’m telling people.”
She blinked, confused. “Why would you do that?”
“Excellent question. Your next assignment is to write a story about a man who tells a lie that makes him look bad. Why would he do such a thing?”
“Ummm. Last night was our last class?”
“You can hand it in next fall.”
“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve pretty much decided not to come back.”
“Because of your workshop?” Her final story had taken a pretty good pummeling. If I hadn’t been preoccupied, I’d have stepped in sooner. Instead, I’d let it continue.
“That,” she admitted, “but other things too.”
“Like what?”
“I guess I thought writing would make me happy,” she said. “It used to, actually. Not anymore.”
I doubted this remark was intended as a criticism, but it was hard to take it any other way. Good workshops offer rigorous analysis that proceeds from goodwill, the desire to be helpful. Bad ones descend into something closer to a blood sport, and that’s what had happened to ours over the last month. According to Bobby and Tana the same thing was happening in their classes, evidence, they believed, that our program was on the rise, that the students we were admitting now were more talented and serious than the ones who were applying a decade ago when the program was still new. Competition was good. I had my doubts. “I’m not sure writing is supposed to make us happy,” I offered.
“Okay, but didn’t you tell us also that if you could be happy without writing then you probably shouldn’t write?”
Yep. I had said this. Yet another truism I’d once subscribed to and now doubted.
“I mean, what’s the point?” she continued. “Nobody reads anymore. Everybody’s watching Netflix. Isn’t reading kind of over?”
“Those Netflix shows are all written,” I pointed out.
“I guess,” she said. “I just keep thinking that to write stories you have to believe you’re special.”
“And you don’t?”
“I think I’m pretty ordinary.”
I grunted.
“What?”
“I only ever hear that from women writers,” I told her, which was true. Their male counterparts by and large proceeded from an entirely different set of personal assumptions. “Mind if I ask how old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“And you think by now you should be extraordinary?”
“Steve Jobs was. Mark Zuckerberg.”
“They weren’t trying to be writers.”
“Taylor Swift?”
“Musical careers typically start earlier. End earlier, too. Look. I can’t tell you if you should quit or not. But you should probably stop comparing yourself to celebrities. That never made anybody feel better about themselves.”
“Okay, but how?”
“How what?”
“How do you just stop doing something you know isn’t good for you?”
“If I knew the answer to that,” I told her, “I wouldn’t have this shiner. What are your plans for the summer?”
She shrugged. “Get a job?”
“Doing?”
“I don’t know. Waiting tables?”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Everybody else is talking about how they’re going to write their asses off. I’m looking forward to not writing. Also I keep thinking I should let somebody else have my teaching assistantship. Somebody who really wants to be here.”
“Don’t be an idiot. TAs are cheap labor. It’s the university that benefits. Take the summer. No writing. Just read. And only women writers, at least a decade older than you. Come the middle of August if you feel the same way, let us know. We’ll find somebody else to abuse.”
“Really?”
“Trust me.”
“I do, actually,” she said. “Trust you?”
“Dear God,” Tana said, sliding back into one end of the booth as Laura slid out the other.
“What?”
Breathless Sally Field was back again. “Oh, I trust you, Professor Sweet. I really, really trust you!”
We stared at each other for a long beat, until I said, “So did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Vomit?”
Before she could answer, her husband returned, again drying his hands on his jeans. “So,” he said. “What’re we talking about?”
“I love you,” Tana told him, and to look at her you’d have sworn she meant it.
His face brightened. “Yeah? How come?”
“Because you choose to be happy. That takes fucking balls.”
Making the turn onto our street, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Cloe’s car in the drive, its hatchback open. Even from a distance I could see that the vehicle was packed to the gills. The front door to the house stood wide open. In my rearview I saw Bobby and Tana—we’d all left the Sweet Spot together—register the situation as well. Bobby started to slow down, but I saw Tana shake her head urgently, and when I pulled into the drive they kept going. They lived on an adjacent cul-de-sac, their house situated almost directly behind ours. Cloe and I had helped them find it when they moved here—what—a decade earlier?
I was standing in the drive, staring at the crammed vehicle—even the passenger seat was stacked high with boxes—when Cloe emerged dragging two large suitcases. I could tell at a glance that there wouldn’t be room for them, but I knew better than to say so. Actually, I was kind of proud of her. She’d thought ahead, leaving the suitcases for last so they’d be accessible when she stopped for the night somewhere between here and Arkansas, where both our families lived. Her usual MO was to just do things and deal with the unforeseen consequences when they arose. It was one of the sadder through-lines of our marriage—her telling me what she wanted to do and why, and me telling her what was wrong with how she was going about it. Now even her goodbye to all that wasn’t going to work out like she’d hoped, yet another bitter pill she had little choice but to swallow.
“Do you mind stepping out of the way?” she said.
I did as instructed. “Cloe,” I said.
“Don’t,” she warned. “There’s room. They’ll fit.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “But not in this vehicle. Take the SUV.”
“I don’t want the SUV.”
“Want doesn’t come into it. It’s what you need.”
“Wait a second,” she said. “Let me write that down. Want doesn’t come into it.”
She hoisted the first suitcase in, and yeah, there was room for that one. The vehicle’s roof sloped, though, which meant the hatchback wouldn’t close over the second. But of course she had to try, and give her credit, when she saw I was right she just set the suitcase down on the pavement and shifted into consequence-mode. Which of the boxes she’d loaded earlier could she do without to make room for the remaining suitcase? Could something be secured to the roof with bungee cords? Some other even dumber idea born of frustration?
“Be sensible,” I said. “Take the good vehicle. I’ll repack it. You really shouldn’t be lugging heavy boxes with an injured shoulder.” Though if last night was any indication, the physical therapy she’d been doing for her torn rotator cuff was paying major dividends.
“You hate my car,” she pointed out.
“It’ll be okay for the summer. Maybe in the fall I’ll trade it in for something better.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Let me guess. One of those little crotch rocket roadsters. Bright red.”
Which pissed me off, of course, though I had it coming. “Please? Let me help?”
She paused, considering, not wanting to admit I was right, not wanting to accept my generosity, if that’s what it was. “I do deserve the better vehicle,” she said.
“No argument.”
“You know, it’s kind of amazing?”
“What is?”
“You’re not even going to ask me to stay, are you.”
“You seem pretty determined.”
“Yeah, except that’s not what’s holding you back. You said last night that you wished I wouldn’t go, but we both know that’s bullshit. With me gone you won’t have to sneak around anymore.” When I said nothing to that, she said, “Fine. Knock yourself out. I’ll be inside.”
I’d loaded only a couple boxes when Bobby pulled up to the curb and got out. Staring at the house, he said, “Tana was right, then? Cloe’s leaving?”
I nodded.
He sighed, genuinely saddened. “You want a hand?”
“Why not?”
It took all of fifteen minutes, but by the time we finished, I was winded. Until this year I’d been good about trying to stay in shape, getting up early to run most mornings, playing Saturday morning basketball with our grad students. I knew I needed to start doing all that again, but lately I felt too old for any of it. We sat on the rear bumper while I caught my breath.
“Should I go inside and say goodbye at least?” Bobby wondered.
I knew how fond he was of Cloe, but I shook my head. “I’m guessing she knows you’re out here. I think what she had in mind was a clean getaway. As if there were such a thing.”
Bobby looked thoughtful. “I ever tell you what Tana said?”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“That I should be married to Cloe and you to her?”
“How did she figure that?”
“She said Cloe and I are nice people, whereas basically you and she are assholes.”
“And you responded?”
“I said you weren’t an asshole.”
Not a bad line. I gave it a chuckle. “A minority view as it turns out, but thanks.”
“Actually,” he said, cocking his head thoughtfully, “I may have said you weren’t that big of an asshole.”
“Again. Minority opinion.”
“So . . . I gather you saw this coming?”
“Yep.”
“For how long?”
“From about the time we said I do. We were best friends. We should’ve left it at that.”
“Still, twenty years together isn’t nothing.”
“This last one’s really been for shit, though.” In fact, I’d known we were finished since February, the day I came home and found her staring into the medicine cabinet. She’d had gallbladder surgery that January and been given a prescription for pain. She had a jock’s suspicion of narcotics, though, so as soon as the hurt began to subside she’d set about weaning herself. When she quit taking the pills the plastic vial was still half full. Closing the medicine cabinet, she saw me standing behind her in the mirror and shook her head in disgust.
“What?” I said.
When she brushed angrily past me, I followed her into the kitchen. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said, yanking open the fridge, then quickly closing it again, as if it contained something she didn’t want me to see.
“Cloe, I’m serious. What?”
She leaned her head against the top of the fridge. “Tell me you didn’t sell them.”
“Sell what?”
“Don’t play stupid, Guy. The Oxys. You know as well as I do how much those pills are worth on the street.”
“You think I would do that?”
“I notice you haven’t denied it.”
“I can’t believe you’re accusing me.”
“Yeah? You should see the look on your face.”
“You should see the look on your own.”
“Did you sell them?”
“No.”
“Did you take them?”
“You mean swallow them?”
“No, I mean did you take them from the cabinet?”
“No. I just told you I didn’t.”
“No, you said you didn’t sell them. Did you give them to someone?”
“No.”
“Your new girlfriend, maybe? Because that would be just like you.”
“I don’t have a new girlfriend,” I told her, which was true.
“Yeah, but you’ve said that before, Guy. And there was.”
In the end I’d convinced her I was telling the truth, at least about the missing pills. But it was over, and I think we both knew it.
“Well,” Bobby said, getting back to his feet, “if you want to talk, I’m around.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Except,” he said, a pained expression on his face, “that’s only partly true. I’m just around until the end of the week.”
This was news. “Where are you off to?”
“Vermont. Both of us, in fact.”
“Yeah? For how long?”
“The whole summer, we hope. Tana’s got an old college friend who scored some sort of fellowship in Italy, so she offered to let us house-sit. Escape the heat.”
“Sounds nice. When did all this happen?”
“The offer was made a few weeks ago, but we just decided last night. Actually?”
I waited. You did well to pay attention to Bobby’s actuallys.
“Yours is not the only messed-up marriage.”
This wasn’t news, but I pretended it was.
“We’re hoping a month or two in the Vermont woods, just the two of us, might get us back on track.”
I nodded. “Well, good luck. Even if it doesn’t work out, at least you’ll be cooler.”
He looked worried. “Rotten timing, though. Will you be okay here by yourself?”
“Me? Sure.”
He didn’t look all that convinced, but we shook on it.
Cloe must’ve been watching us from inside because as soon as Bobby drove off, she came out and handed me the keys to her hatchback. I took the keys to the SUV off their ring and handed them to her. “Zip me an email when you get where you’re going?”
“Please don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend you care.”
“I’m not pretending. I do care. Are you going to be all right?”
She shrugged. “We’ll see. I’ll have family and friends around. I won’t be lonely, at least.” Like she was here with me, no need to put that into words.
Sliding in behind the wheel, she inserted her key in the ignition. When she didn’t immediately turn it, I said, “Did Tana tell you she and Bobby were heading to Vermont for the summer?”
“I knew she was thinking about it. She’s decided to let Bobby come too?”
“She was thinking about going alone?”
“I shouldn’t have told you that. It was spoken in confidence.”
I thought about telling her what Bobby said, about all of us being married to the wrong people, make a joke out of it, but decided against it. Instead, I said, “What about this place?”
“What about it?”
“I don’t really need a house if it’s just me.”
“Right,” she said. “Except it’s not just you.”
It was nearly midnight when the gate swung open on its creaky hinge. A moment later Tana joined me on the patio where for the last several hours I’d been sitting in darkness that would’ve been complete but for a neighbor’s yellow patio light. Lifting the whiskey bottle to gauge how much was left, she poured some into the extra glass I’d brought out just in case. “You’re up late,” I ventured.
“Bobby’s snoring.”
“What if he wakes up and finds you gone?”
“Oh, he’ll definitely wake up. He has to pee at least three times a night. First time’s usually around one-thirty, though.” She sighed mightily. “How many people do you suppose would get married if they knew that in the end it all comes down to peeing and snoring?” She chuckled. “So. No bar fight? No three-hundred-pound woman in a MAGA hat?”
“Nope. Lacrosse ball.”
“Sorry?”
“Cloe was using it to rehab her rotator cuff. It must’ve been handy, because I came into the bedroom and the next thing I knew I was sitting on my ass out in the hall.” When Tana didn’t say anything, I glanced over and saw that her shoulders were shaking.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “It’s just that her being such a jock was always what you liked best about her.”
Which was true. The Cloe I’d fallen for was Cloe in motion. She was most herself with a ball or racquet in her hand. “I don’t think she’d made up her mind to leave until she saw what she’d done. It scared her, was my impression.”
“Bobby tells me you saw it coming?”
“The lacrosse ball or her leaving?”
“Her leaving, idiot.”
“Yeah, I did. You don’t seem that surprised.”
“She told me a while back that she was thinking about it.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
We sat quietly, both of us staring at the dark second-story window of their house on the other side of the fence that separated their cul-de-sac from ours. If Bobby did wake up to pee, we’d see the light go on. The proximity of our houses had been nice, at least in the beginning. They’d see Cloe and me having a glass of wine on the back deck and call to see if we wanted company. We usually did. We made a fun, if oddly configured, foursome, Cloe and Bobby enjoying their straightforward, earnest conversations, Tana and I trading snark. Then one night they came to dinner and Tana touched my wrist—to get my attention, I thought, since Bobby and I were arguing about baseball, the only sport either of us cared much about—but the touch lingered, and later that night, after they’d gone home, I went upstairs and noticed the light on in their bedroom window. The curtain was pulled back and a moment later Tana appeared, naked from the waist up, and stood looking across our dark yards, a good long beat before pulling the curtain closed. That was how it had begun. So no, I hadn’t really lied to Cloe. It wasn’t a new girlfriend I had.
“So,” I said. “Vermont?”
“Yep.”
“When were you planning to tell me?”
“Tonight. Right now.”
The neighbor’s patio light happened to switch off right then, and suddenly Tana’s hair wasn’t red anymore, which for some reason sent a wave of panic over me, as if at that moment I’d looked down and seen that the deck was writhing with serpents. I must’ve made some sort of noise because Tana looked over at me and said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
Taking out her phone, she brought up the flashlight feature and shined it on me. “You’re sweating.”
“I know,” I said. In fact, just that quickly I’d soaked through my shirt. In the reflected light of her phone I could see that her hair was still red, that neither it nor she had winked out, and for some reason this calmed me. I could feel my breathing return to normal.
“Are you having a heart attack?”
“No,” I said. “At least I don’t think so.”
“You’re a mess, Guy.” When she turned off the phone’s flashlight app, her hair went black again, and I waited for the panic to return, but it didn’t. “Maybe we should go inside,” she suggested.
Later, after we’d had sex, we lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, until I said, “So how do you see this all working out?”
“What working out?”
“When you and Bobby return in the fall. Do we just start up again?”
“Maybe. Probably. I mean, there’s nobody else, right?”
Since she really seemed to want to know, I told her no, there was nobody else. Not with Cloe gone.
“Maybe,” I said, “we should just surrender the pretense.”
“Which?”
“Of being decent people.”
“Absolutely not,” she said with surprising conviction.
“Really? I mean, look at us.”
She shrugged. “Think of it as a choice. My husband chooses to be happy. I choose to think of myself as a good person.”
“But—”
She reached over and put a finger on my lips. “The next thing you say will be very, very wrong.”
Little did she know. Because it had been on the tip of my tongue to ask if she was the one who swiped the Oxys. How many evenings this spring had we come together here, the four of us, for drinks or dinner, each of these an opportunity. My first thought had been that we’d been burgled, but it made more sense for the thief to be someone who not only had access but knowledge of Cloe’s recent surgery. Add to that the fact that she and Bobby, as a result of having bought more house than they could really afford, were always strapped for cash, always having to ask either her parents or his for a loan, and, well . . .
She rose and pulled on her panties, and I smiled, remembering our first time, how pleased I’d been that her collars and cuffs matched. “You should get some sleep,” she suggested.
“You’re right,” I said, though Bobby’s earlier diagnosis—that what I needed was to get my head examined—seemed equally valid.
When she was gone I went over to the window. In the darkness I could make out just the line of their roof until a minute later a light came on downstairs, Tana returning. At almost the same instant a light went on upstairs in their curtained bedroom window. I checked my watch and, sure enough: one-thirty on the dot; Bobby waking up to pee. Somewhere, from the general direction of downtown, there were sirens, a bunch of them.
Pulling the curtains shut, I climbed back into bed and was about to switch off the lamp when my phone buzzed with an incoming text, which read: He tells people he was in a bar fight because it’s less ridiculous than the truth. I imagine he’s probably been telling lies like this most of his life, which is why he’s fun to be around. Still, I feel kind of sorry for him.
I thought about writing Me, too, but couldn’t decide if that was true.
The next morning I awoke to another text, this one from Bobby: Well, you were right. We’re going to have to find a new place to drink next fall.
What little was left of the Sweet Spot was still smoking by the time I arrived. The fire had apparently started in the men’s room around closing. There’d been just a few stragglers drinking at the bar after last call, and despite being shit-faced they’d all managed to make it out of the burning building. Everybody thought there’d been no casualties until somebody noticed Raymond’s Harley in the otherwise empty parking lot. The bike had been customized so it could be driven by a guy with hooks for hands. I’d seen him around and it was wonderful what he could do with those hooks of his. There are some things, though, that no man wants others to witness, and in the men’s room Raymond always used the only stall that had a door. That was where the firefighters found his charred remains. Had he closed the door behind him and in his panic been unable to work the latch that opened it? Or had he nodded off on the commode?
“I’m sorry, Professor,” said a voice at my elbow. A student, one of Tana’s poets, or maybe Bobby’s. I must’ve looked confused, because he said, “You own the place, right?”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” I told him.
“Everybody says you do,” he pointed out.
I started to explain that default mode for any decent writer should be curiosity, a need to verify the truth of what “everybody” believes. Instead I just said, “Trust me, I don’t.”
The look he gave me then was both sly and knowing. “Then how come you’re crying?” was what he wanted to know. Had he been one of my fiction students, I’d have told him to write me a story that would answer this question, but he wasn’t, so I just let him believe what he wanted.