True, for a while there after Philip died he’d had a pretty rough time. But no life unravels from a single thread. Disaster is always a preexisting condition, a metastasized truth. So it would be wrong to blame Philip for the intrusion of the irrational in his affairs, and for all of what followed, a series of events with no beginning or end.
If he had to pick a middle, however, he supposed he’d choose that night of the Dunns’ dinner party, back on Memorial Day weekend.
As usual, he’d stopped off at Cork & Bottle to pick up some wine. Teddy had no particular interest in wine as a subject area, though he enjoyed drinking it of course; nonetheless his approach that evening, running his gaze across the sturdy, square-shouldered Bordeaux, the sloping chardonnays, the various Malbecs and pinots and Syrahs, could only be described as scholarly. He squinted over the labels, reading the fine print, parsing out pedigrees and percentages, getting a feel for the terroir. Every bottle seemed its own glass house, a private world of hidden lights, secret fermentations. He could almost hear the earth that had yielded the grapes calling to him through the glass, begging to be released, sprung from its cork.
He was in need of some release himself. All week he’d been up late, losing arguments with various people who irritated him. First the school board over budget and curricular issues, then his daughter Mimi over dress codes and curfews. This itself was annoying; he was accustomed to getting his way. To sit at the head of a long table, putting forth an agenda, conducting, over baked goods and coffee, a brisk, constructive dialogue—this was Teddy’s forte. But lately something had gone awry. Some sag or softness had crept into the hard core of his will. The briskness, the dialogue, and the constructive vibe were gone. He tried to compensate for this by talking way too loud and far too much, but of course that only made things worse. “You’ve gone out of your tree,” Mimi had told him, storming away. “You’re losing it completely.”
“I hate that expression. Losing it. What does it even mean?”
“Forget it. Go away.”
The slamming of a teenager’s door in a parent’s face, though often intended as a provocation, is invariably experienced by that parent as something of a relief. In this case it excused him from the chore of entering Mimi’s bedroom to hash things out and seek closure and resolution, as Gail and most of the mothers he knew surely would have. Instead he’d done the fatherly thing, what his own father had done in such moments, and his father’s father before him—gone downstairs, turned on the TV, and zoned out. Better that than to listen to any more angry and resentful comments from the women in his life. There were too many angry women in his life, and not enough angry men. With the exception he supposed of himself.
Anyway Mimi was wrong: he wasn’t losing it. If anything he was gaining. Gaining weight, accumulating burdens, amassing a hard, briny crust of disinterest over whatever pearls of longing and fear lay cradled inside him. Sometimes when the house grew quiet, and a calm had settled over the domestic battlefields, Teddy would lay down his arms and shields and pick up the remote, flipping to one of the high, distant channels—79, 83, 97—beyond the cable’s reach, his head lolling against the cushions like a man swathed in steaming towels, waiting to be shaved clean. And any calls from upstairs or below, any signal wriggling toward him through the waves of tumultuous static, he failed to register or acknowledge. As people do, he imagined, when they’ve zoned out a little too far for a little too long.
In the end of course he’d chosen the wine the same way he always did: more or less at random and for all the wrong reasons. He liked the label, the logo, the stately antique font. He liked that it was in French, a language he did not speak well, though he often found himself employing it anyway. And then there was the price. Teddy didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of man who chose his purchases based on money alone—though he was exactly that sort of man—but the price in this case ($12) appealed at once to his vanity, his thrift, and his sense of modesty. He took the bottle to the register and paid for it in cash. The clerk handed him his change. There was not so much of it as he’d hoped. Then he crumpled the receipt in his pocket and made for the car, where the engine was still running, his wife still leaning against the side window where he’d left her, eyes open but abstracted, her thoughts picking their way fastidiously through some dewy inner forest.
After all his deliberations they were now running late. They drove in silence to the Dunns’, listening to the throb and purr of the engine shuddering beneath the hood. They could just as easily have been talking, but they weren’t. Teddy had been married long enough to realize that sometimes not talking signified a problem and sometimes it signified more or less the opposite and sometimes it signified nothing much at all. So much depended upon context. A word at breakfast, a missed opportunity in the bedroom, the tenor of a dinnertime sigh.
“How you doing over there?”
She didn’t answer. He looked at her, this person beside him, with real wonder and apprehension. Her black hair, threaded with gray, her white neck, her serious mouth, the elliptical blue smudge of her eyes, the milky veil of powder that clung to her cheek. Her long, inward-tapering fingers. Who was she? How was she doing? When he put on a piece of music, she invariably asked him to change it. When he cooked a special dinner or recounted some small triumph at work, her appreciation was mild, fleeting. It seemed they had wandered into yet another anteroom in the big house of marriage, a room with faded rugs and unpolished furniture and low-wattage lights. In the middle of sex they’d long for sleep, in the middle of sleep they’d long for sex, and so it came to pass they generally managed not enough of either, but simply—though it did not feel simple—lay stranded between, in the purgatorial half-light, while the second hand of the clock, feverishly amplified by silence, ticked and twitched. Sometimes you just had to muddle through on trust. Trust that your marriage was greater than the sum of its parts. Trust that even if you were only half-attentive toward each other—even if you held hands less often than you used to, kissed less soulfully than you used to; even if the only new thing about your bodies at this point was how not-new they were; even if the marriage, after twenty-two years, stubbornly refused to stabilize, refused to hold still and refused to change, even if it corseted and withheld as often as it gave and accommodated; even if it never got any easier, only harder, and then harder still—trust that this was what you’d signed up for, more or less. The epic struggle of two lives forced into one.
And theirs was a good marriage, Teddy thought. A busy, sexually ongoing affair, with interludes of comfort and laughter that eased the nerves and cajoled the heart to unclench its bloody fist. He didn’t even want to think about what a bad marriage was like. Though he often did, of course. Bad marriages were something of a growth industry among his friends. Bad marriages had too many interludes of comfort, and of the wrong kind. Comfort became a mistress, an object of guilt and pleasure, a silken, cooing presence who understood how hard you worked, how oppressed you were by the needs of others. And then in time the guilt faded, and there was only the comfort, and the necessity for more of it, for a larger and better appointed comfort zone in which to lounge around by yourself. And your spouse was only a shadow, a dark mirror in another part of the house. And the good marriage was no longer a good marriage. Yes, Teddy had seen it happen. He’d seen it happen to a number of his friends.
“You were out in the yard today,” Gail said. “I can always tell. You get all flushed and healthy and purposeful-looking when you work outside.”
“Do I?”
“Mmm.”
But it hadn’t happened to them. He had not abandoned Gail: he loved her more intemperately, depended on her more absolutely than ever. He had wanted a strong-willed woman and he had got one. If she had turned out a bit too strong-willed, and if it was on some level baffling and depleting to be married to her all the time, that was hardly Gail’s fault; no doubt it was baffling and depleting to be married to anyone all the time. That was only the B side of the record. The A side, the money side, was this: this feeling right now, this bottomless proximity, like a reservoir that never emptied, only filled.
His marriage was the triumph of his life. To have already done it, chosen and been chosen, to have made that profound, implausible compact, and out of what? Ephemeral longings, scraps of loneliness and lust, a catalog of insecurities as long as one’s arm, and a piece of embossed paper from the state licensing authorities. Miraculous.
“I got a lot done out there.”
“Of course you did,” she said. “You work yourself like a pack-horse. You’re so impatient to get it all done, you wind up going twice as fast as you should.”
Then he remembered his irritation that morning when he’d discovered that the work gloves were missing, and the garden hose, hopelessly tangled, was unscrewed at the source, and the hedge clippers were rusty from being left out in the rain. People were often careless about things they didn’t care about. And Gail was careless about a lot of things, most of which Teddy did care about, and arguably too much. But to bring out his ledger of petty complaints now would invite an argument, so he kept them to himself, the way people do in good marriages, and for all he knew in bad marriages too.
“I picked up a bottle of Grenache,” he informed her modestly. “Some new hybrid. Anyway it was on sale.”
“You don’t need to justify getting a nice wine. It’s what people do.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Her tone in all fairness was not so much argumentative as absent, preoccupied. She was in one of her lonely planet moods for which he could find no index. “Forgive me. I’m feeling punky tonight. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe we should have stayed home.”
“Interesting how you always say that the very minute before we arrive.”
“It’s because I always mean it, I guess.”
“At home with me and the girls, you’re restless and bored, you resist going out, but then if someone—i.e., me—forces you out, you wind up enjoying yourself way more than I do. No offense but it’s a little maddening, frankly.”
“And here I am thinking it’s quirky and endearing.”
“I know you do, Bear.”
“I mean,” he said, “thinking you think it’s quirky and endearing.”
The silence that followed this exchange, like that which preceded it, might have been either charged with meaning or devoid of it—or neither, or both—but there was no time to investigate it now, they were already pulling up to the Dunns’ front yard, already at the door, already saying hello, already exchanging pleasantries in the language of that foreign country they still visited occasionally, where other people lived.
Immediately upon entering the house he all but threw the bottle of wine at his hostess, Fiona Dunn. Fiona, without bothering to peek inside the bag, handed it off to her husband, Alex, who coolly inspected the label with his usual air of half-concealed superiority and then whisked it off to the kitchen. Where, Teddy reflected dolefully, it would go the way of all wines, sitting around for months in the company of other bottles, probably better ones, brought by other friends, probably better ones, from previous dinner parties that would probably turn out to be better ones too.
In Fiji—where had he read this?—when a warrior comes to your hut for dinner, he brings a fresh corpse along. It’s what people do. But then Teddy Hastings was no one’s idea of a warrior.
Another thing people do, he thought, is attend dinner parties on Saturday evenings when they’d prefer to stay home and watch the basketball play-offs on their enormous flat-screen televisions. Teddy as a rule hated dinner parties. He hated small talk; hated listening to stories about other people’s children; hated eating and drinking to excess around other people’s tables; hated above all knowing that despite these aversions he’d inevitably wind up doing these things anyway, and enjoying them more than he should. Already tonight he’d knocked down a glass and a half of wine, several generous handfuls of pistachios, and a dozen olives, and they’d only been here ten minutes. You’d have thought he’d starved himself all day when in fact he’d had a late and enormous lunch.
To restrain his rogue appetites he thrust one hand deep into the pocket of his slacks. There it had to content itself fingering his keys and jiggling his change and, just incidentally, brushing up against his penis, which, summoned by friction, began to lift its stupid head, and rise.
A boner! At his age! He didn’t know whether to be appalled or relieved.
He waited for someone to notice, to call attention to the bulge in his pants, the swollen contours of his shame. But no one was even looking his way. The house was full of people whom on some level to which Teddy did not quite have access at the moment he recognized to be his dearest friends. And yet they all steered clear. Who wouldn’t? For months he’d been like this, moody and erratic, susceptible to sudden panics. Aside from Gail and his daughters, one of whom was in a foreign country and the other might as well have been, and three or four people at school—Carol, his secretary; Jeff Mazza in PE; Renee Daley—he tolerated no one. For a while he’d had hopes for that new hire, Pierce, in the friendship department, had gone so far as to recruit him for the Wild Bunch, his weekly basketball game, but after a few months of intermittent attendance the guy had stopped coming altogether. Unreliable. Anyway he wasn’t much of a ballplayer, Pierce. He ran the floor well but he lacked aggressiveness; he never went all out, never drove to the hole or took a charge. Teddy knew the type. Philip too used to hang at the top of the key, biding his time, avoiding contact with the big studs in the paint. Mama’s boys. He knew what they were like. That pampered, ironical look. That indolent slouch. That sly, grudging aura of not-yet. That was what came of being the favorite, the darling, the bright, skinny, good-looking one who waits for a clear shot…
Yet here was the injustice: Somehow, when he was with such people, Teddy’s own best qualities—his force and vigor in the paint, his ability to do things and not just think about them, to fix a car, lay a floor, patch a wall—seemed trivial and commonplace even to him. Why? Especially when neither Philip nor, he was willing to bet, Oren Pierce had ever owned so much as a working wrench?
How easy it was, to step back and view this entire evening at the Dunns’ through Philip’s end of the telescope. In their ordered happiness Philip would find only smugness; in their warmth and vitality he’d see sublimation; in the subjects they spoke of he’d home in on the vanity and the materialism but miss the implied depths, the worries and sorrows that shadowed the words. It was unfair of course, it was ungenerous and reductive, but then there was no arguing with Philip. Philip was dead. Philip was gone. Philip was exempt; he floated like a thought bubble over the comic strip of the days.
“What’s the matter with you tonight?” Gail asked. “You’ve hardly said hello to anyone.”
“Well, no one’s said hello to me.”
“What are you, four?”
“Actually I was looking for that bottle of wine we brought. Have you seen it? I was hoping for a taste before it disappeared.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Maybe you should ease up in the wine-tasting department. Pace yourself.”
“I am pacing myself.”
“I realize that,” she said. “That’s what worries me.”
Across the street, dogs were barking behind invisible fences. Fringes of twilight hung on the trees. The Bonavidas were pruning their rosebushes, the leaves so green you could not see the thorns. The apple trees were in blossom; brown wasps, sun-dazed, bonged against the screens. Women whisking bare-armed down the sidewalks, the blooms on their cheeks like the flush of love. The sway of their soft, fruit-colored dresses—plum, gooseberry, peach—turned on a sprinkler in Teddy’s chest, sent forth a spray of liquid melancholy that was indistinguishable from happiness.
Why ease up, he thought, when easing up was not in his nature? He too had spent the day outdoors, astride his roaring Toro like a general. He’d buzzed down the weeds, pulverized the stalks, decapitated the dandelions. Gail had no idea. Gail was a liberal pacifist; if it were up to her, they’d all just have their way out there, the slugs and the bugs, the deer and woodchucks and rabbits, nibbling down the produce and bounding off to the woods to excrete it. But the garden was no place for pacifism. In the garden it was death first, and then the new life. You had to be a bit of a fascist, had to be vigilant and aggressive: wage war, declare martial law, ban free assembly, deploy chemical weapons, put up fences along the border, and deport the intruders—whatever short-term damage you might cause (he thought of all the harmless spruces he’d dug up, mistaking them for sumacs) along the way. Because nature was capricious; what it gave one day it took back the next. And Teddy should know. Already he’d landed his occupying force. He’d turned over the earth, ripped out the weeds, and flung away the stones. He’d heaped on the manure in huge loamy clods. True, the seeds he’d laid down did not conform exactly to their lines, you could glimpse the occasional veer and swoop. But so what? Soon the first crops would come up regardless—lettuces, herbs, heirloom tomatoes—in the same casual and miraculous way they always did. The Early Girls. To see their green shoots poking greedily, irresistibly through the earth’s crust gave him an unnameable pleasure. He felt like a force of nature. A man who plunged his thick, hairy arms into the soil and brought forth the goods.
The stereo was playing old favorites. Talking Heads. The Stones.
“Nobody’s eating,” he heard Alex complain, across the room.
He turned. His wife was gone. Beside him, in the gurgling depths of the Dunns’ aquarium, a solitary fish bumped blindly along the glass, waving his gaudy rainbow-colored fins. Some life, Teddy thought. Swimming circles through your own feces. He himself had always been partial to the bottom dwellers, the pale, bulbous types, the corys and caddises, who didn’t mind a little darkness, who carried their houses on their backs to protect them from predators. You couldn’t evict a caddis from his house. No way. You had to swallow them both whole.
“I love this cheese,” Fiona said. “It’s made from sheep’s milk. And these spelt crackers. Try some.”
Rising on tiptoe, she laid the cracker on his tongue like a Communion wafer. You had to hand it to Fiona: the cheese was superb. So were the olives: puckered, herb-coated, bitter and dark as tea. And the prosciutto shaved so thin it was almost translucent. It would have been easy to make fun of her—Philip would have—but Fiona was so stylish and smart, so immune on so many levels to the criticism of mere mortals (her waist, after three children, still slim as a teenager’s), all he could do was admire her. And maybe every so often, right now for instance, fantasize idly about sleeping with her. Even as he acknowledged to himself that she and Alex made a winning pair. They were good at giving parties, at the soft arts of hospitality, the food, the music, the flicker and glow. True, Alex had failed to get tenure at Columbia, the great wound of his life. But at Carthage College he had the whole package: easy schedule, summers and sabbaticals, a wood-floored Victorian with a wraparound porch. And if, like Alex, you rarely used that porch, if you instead made something of a fetish of shooting down to the city as often as possible, and referred to your colleagues as criminally dull, and to your neighbors as those weird thick-necked people on the other side of the yard, and to that big house you’d bought and furnished so admirably as the velvet coop… well, this too seemed part of the package.
Meanwhile in Teddy’s view it was a hell of a nice house. The living room with its Tunisian rugs and leather reading chairs seemed more ample and artfully arranged, more lived in, than his. Something about other people’s living rooms reminded you how little time you spent in your own. But maybe that was the point of living rooms, he thought: to remind you to live.
Around him his friends spoke of the usual subjects, their children’s lives, their parents’ deaths. You couldn’t blame them. It was an in-between phase.
Of course if Philip were here, Teddy knew what he would say. To Philip, the shining Steinway, the plummy Bokhara, the Mexican weavings, the Balinese puppets, the aboriginal masks, all the primitive tchotchkes brought home from summer travels, would reek of desperation and entitlement, the death throes of a second-rate empire. Hoarding of objects, Philip would say: a classic symptom of depression. Expecting the world to surrender its goods and lie belly-up at your feet like a dog—this was not just arrogance, Philip would say, but pathology. Yes, Philip would say that too. Even the music they were playing would be suspect to Philip. It was one thing, he’d say, to listen to these songs back when they were written; but an entirely other thing now, decades later, the warps, hisses, and cracks of the original vinyl stamped flat by the digital heel, processed and perfected into a small, shining disc. The problem with people like Philip was that they said way too much and did way too little. They were watchers, commentators; they couldn’t just relax and enjoy nice stuff for its own sake.
Not that Teddy was so relaxed either, mind you. He was still holding the olive pits in his hand. A bowl should have been set out, but there was no bowl. But there should have been. But there wasn’t. Suddenly he was furious. It had to do with the taste of the olives, and the feel of the cold pits in his hand.
“Looking for someone?”
Will Dennis, another member of the Wild Bunch, was examining him thoughtfully, trailing two fingers through his formidable mustache. He was a tall, high-domed pediatrician who worked half days in good weather and spent the other half out on his boat, roaring across the lake. He was going to talk sports, Teddy thought. It was one of their few subjects in common. “How’s the thumb? Still jammed?”
“Always.”
“Someday it’ll heal, you know. Then you’ll need a new excuse for that set shot of yours.”
“One of these days,” Teddy said, “I’ll try a new sport. Racquetball maybe.”
“What’s the point, Ted? You’ll wind up playing at the same level eventually. We all do.”
Christ, he was surrounded by cynics.
“You should wipe your face, Will. The gazelle’s out in the garden. Time to go hunting.”
“Say what?”
“It’s how the bedouins talk. It means you’ve got crumbs in your beard. Or mustache in this case.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Will dabbed his upper lip with a napkin and inspected the results impassively. “And how do the bedouins say people who aren’t bedouins shouldn’t try to talk like they are?”
“Actually I don’t think they have a phrase for that.”
“Too bad.” Will smiled amiably. On the court too he was unflappable, a solid ball-handler and rebounder, a deadly shot from beyond the arc. Teddy was more of an up-and-downer, a player of droughts and streaks, erratic moves. Of course at their age the goal was just to fling yourself around and sweat out the toxins for a couple of hours without winding up in the hospital, ensnared by rubber tubes. Still, all things being equal, he’d have preferred to be calm and steady on the court, like Will, who wore his two first names easily, like an entitlement to boyishness. “I’m fine by the way, thank you for asking.”
Teddy nodded. “Work going well?”
“Booming. Just the asthma and allergy cases alone. It’s the environment.”
“Yeah, all that filth.”
“On the contrary,” Will said, “all that cleanliness. All that good plumbing and sanitation and hypoallergenic soap. It’s killing us. Immunologically speaking, we’ve cleaned up the environment way too well. We’d be better off out in the wild, living like barbarians. Out there with the mold and the germs and the animal feces. Our native state.”
“Come check out Mimi’s room sometime. It might change your mind.”
“People don’t realize. The body needs mess. That’s how it keeps itself strong. Otherwise you get all these systemic overreactions to piddly little irritants like pollen. Speaking of which, what’s the word from Danny?”
“She’s fine.” Teddy jiggled the olive pits in his palm, like dice. “Touring around Asia at the moment. She’ll be home soon. She has that summer internship, you know, down in the city.”
“That’ll be nice for you. To have her back.”
“Yeah.”
Danielle had gone over to China on her junior year abroad. They’d expected her back in April, but she’d changed her return ticket, had needed, she said, a little more time over there to unwind. Unwinding appeared to agree with Danielle—one more Eastern discipline, like tae kwon do or meditation, to be practiced and mastered with her usual bravura intensity. But fine. The girl worked hard; she’d earned some time off. She was a type A, like him; it was her style, her fate, to throw herself into things. This the same plump, curly-haired girl who read Mr. Popper’s Penguins at age four, who starred in South Pacific at age twelve, who brought the house down singing Billie Holiday at the ninth-grade cabaret. “God Bless the Child.” So what if “unwinding,” from what little information he’d wormed out of Gail, appeared to consist of hanging out on some beach called Haad Yuan, drinking and tanning and sleeping with pretty much any able-bodied boy who flip-flopped past regardless of nationality or religion? That was the energy of globalism: everyone smushed together in the same tent. Haad Yuan! What did it mean—mean about him—that he envied her as much as he did? What did it mean that he’d spend half an hour in his office poring over his antique globe, his finger tracing the extremities of the Pacific Rim, trying to locate the source of those two magic words he could not even pronounce?
Teddy too had had his wild times back in college—well, a couple of wild times anyway—but now those times were behind him, back in their day. Now he was that familiar, uninspired thing: a middle-aged man. His eyes in cold weather turned brittle and dry. The hair was vanishing from his calves; dark moles, bumpy and irregular, were spreading across his back. He felt weirdly hardened in some places and tender in others. He’d sleep badly, awake to small confusions of time and space, and stumble into the bathroom to piss, only to find his father’s face, pouchy and peevish, glaring back at him in the mirror above the sink. The house needed paint. The cows stood frozen in the fields. Soon they would all sit down to dinner, he and his friends, and enjoy an evening of small, modest rewards. A good meal in your belly. A new joke. The name of a reliable handyman. Somewhere out there, in the gathering dark, he had two comely daughters—lean, long-necked, soft-armed—and just across the room, a beautiful and intelligent wife. A wife with tact and heart and strong values, who read substantial books and made note of their friends’ birthdays in her crowded organizer, and whose busy schedule did not prevent her from undertaking pro bono work on behalf of the local Bosnian and Sudanese refugees, and the Mexican campesinos tucked illegally away on dairy farms, and the Jamaican pickers shipped in to work the orchards, and all the other needy, powerless people who’d arrived in their narrow green valley in recent years like messengers from that distant world beyond the mountains; a wife who after all this asked no greater reward for herself than to begin her day by climbing atop her husband and, in the throes of pleasure, arching her back like a pole dancer. Was this not a good enough life? Nice food, comfortable chairs, a snoring dog at the foot of the bed. Fresh flowers laid out in spacious rooms. The level blue heat of marital sex. Around him good friends talking about their children and houses, books they had and hadn’t read, and while maybe nothing so brilliant or memorable was being said there would be occasional winning, perceptive remarks, and these were important to register, the smarts and goodwill of unexceptional people living as fully and honorably as their circumstances allowed, cooking meals, making plans, attending meetings, paying taxes, and continuing to love each other despite the fact that soon enough they’d all be dead.
“Are you still out here hogging the olives?” Fiona said, lifting her eyebrows. “Come, you beast. It’s time for dinner.”
Teddy watched them move away into the other room. No one waited for him. Why should they? He was not a child, even if he’d begun to feel like one, and, okay, to act like one too. He stood brooding by the unlit fireplace. Photos of the Dunns’ handsome, soccer-playing children, whom he’d always liked, were displayed along the mantel. Danielle had never liked the Dunn kids; she had run with a different crowd. Athletics were not her thing. Not Mimi’s either. He could compile a long list of things that were not his daughters’ things, and an alarmingly short list of things that were their things. As a rule they’d always tended toward evasiveness on the whole thing question. But then so did he, he supposed. So did their mother. It was what made them tolerant and forgiving of each other. Even if it also made them the opposite of tolerant, the opposite of forgiving.
Suddenly tears were in his eyes. He felt stretched out and brittle, an elastic band that’d lost its shape. Lately it seemed no matter how sunny and serpentine the course of his thoughts, this was where they wound up. This finish line. This shuttered terminal.
Get a grip, he thought. Just because you’re dying doesn’t mean nothing matters; it means everything does. But he felt as if under a beam; he could not pull away.
They’d stuck Philip in the ground the last day of September. A cold clear morning, the leaves tipped with frost. Teddy had clutched his daughters’ hands, watching the jets crisscross over Logan, their vapor trails hanging up there, puffy and white, like a frayed net. “In the midst of life we are in death,” the minister had intoned. What the hell, the guy had done his best. Teddy knew what it was like, having to speak on landmark occasions, to preside over the crowd, dress up little threadbare platitudes in togas and garlands. So he admired the minister’s professionalism, plugging away at the absolutes while the wind threw around everyone’s hair and the stiff dewy grass, recently cut, adhered to their dress shoes, on a day better suited to football or hockey than to the burial of a forty-four-year-old clinical psychologist from Wayland, Massachusetts.
Then of course the others began to step forward to do their best. Philip’s best friend from college. Philip’s mentor from grad school. Philip’s neighbor, tennis partner, supervisor, his former patients and protégés…all came up to deliver their own special tributes and anecdotes. Teddy’s face stiffened like a mask. It seemed the final indignity in a long line of indignities: even now, with the last hour up, the last client gone through the door, poor Philip had to lie there and listen while the parade of moist-eyed narcissists droned on. Now they had the answers, and he was the one lying down and taking it. The shrink being shrunk. The cool, tough-minded ironist, sentimentalized to mush.
Oh, if only he’d had an ax! He’d have hacked open that pine box, thrown the corpse over his shoulder, and run. But he had no ax. Nothing to smash, nothing to smash with.
“And now perhaps Philip’s brother would like to say a few final words?”
Teddy looked around expectantly, waiting like everyone else for the brother in question to step forward. But no one moved.
“Houston,” Danielle whispered, “we have a problem.”
His mind was an unmarked blackboard; there was no chalk. Worms were writhing in the dirt at his feet. Everything he had was going to be taken from him, he thought.
“Classic,” Mimi hissed. “Absolutely classic.”
Gail squeezed his hand. Jets roared across the vast, pitiless sky.
“There are of course feelings that resist expression,” the minister acknowledged, “just as there are moments in our lives when it does us good to try. For the sake of our loved ones perhaps. If not for ourselves.”
“Hear that?” Mimi whispered. “He’s talking about you.”
“Hush.” Gail squeezed his hand.
He did love his wife. He did love his wife so.
“Nothing?” The minister’s voice, beneath the FM glaze, took on a cloying pitch. He was pretty pushy for an Episcopalian. “Nothing at all?”
Teddy studied the ground bitterly, waiting to be released. The wind tunneled in his ears. Nothing’s something too, he thought. He had a terrible impulse to look at his watch. Christ he hated Boston traffic. Hated the whole city—the lousy parking, the overpriced food, the squares that weren’t square, all those think tanks and tech labs tucked away smugly on their symmetrical campuses like an alternate universe for PhDs. He remembered his last trip, back in May, stewing in ball-game gridlock on a Sunday afternoon, trying to drive Philip to the cancer center at Dana-Farber. The stuff was in his bones by then. There was only one other patient, a skinny young woman in a flowered scarf, taking chemo in a reclining chair. Her eyes were closed. He’d never seen such stillness, such aloneness. He’d vowed to himself never to forget that young woman, her lunar pallor in that windowless room. But of course he had. He’d forgotten and forgotten and forgotten. He had no idea now if she was alive or dead.
“Well then.” The minister beamed decisively, as if in some way relieved. “May God bless you all.”
And that was that. The crane whirred and clanked, lowering the coffin by incremental jerks into the hole in the earth. His wife and daughters wept. Big cars swished down the silent lanes. Teddy stood gaping like a child at the excavated space. Only at the last instant, when the box was about to touch bottom, did he turn away.
He went and wandered out among the enormous elms, their dry leaves dropping over him one by one. What was there to say? A man wakes up one day with a spot on his knee, a lesion roughly the size of a penny; a year later he’s gone. No amount of Gemzar or Navilbene could deter the cells from growing; no amount of Dilaudid or morphine could relieve the pain. It was tragic of course, but such tragedies were common, inescapable, the rules of a club so inclusive it was hardly a club. And now he had joined this nonclub, or rather Philip had. Teddy remained outside with the others, behind the velvet ropes, gawking and complaining. To what end? One might as well complain about the falling leaves, and the frosted ground, and the snow that would inevitably follow.
No, complaining did no good. Better to shut up and do things. Better to live in the present and speak with your body, as the animals do. The Hastings men were good at that. Even Philip, the brainy one, the sensitive, psychological one—okay, maybe he wasn’t much of a doer, but he had never been a complainer either. Until the end. At the end, he’d complained plenty.
And Teddy? The best you could say was that he was in a period of flux, oscillating between action and complaint. Not that anyone these days seemed eager to say the best of him.
For a while there after the funeral he’d consorted with grief like an alcoholic friend. There were dark, sloppy nights in underground rooms. There were bitter memories and dismal confessions and awkward meandering interludes of silence. But in the end grief had proved a disappointing companion. In the end grief had little to say that was new or interesting, and what it did say was numbingly repetitive, self-absorbed. Grief just sat there, sodden and grieving, taking up space. Teddy was glad to be rid of it.
True, he still cried a lot for no reason, and behaved erratically with friends. True, the human touch still eluded him. But he knew it would return soon, whether he wanted it to or not. Meanwhile Philip had left behind, back in Wayland, a six-year-old daughter, a ten-year-old son, and a forty-year-old widow, Sonya, who also cried a lot presumably, though on their own time. On the phone with Uncle Teddy they were perky and forbearing, as if sparing him their sadness, or hoarding it to themselves. Come to think of it, the only time he’d seen the little girl, Olivia, let fly with tears was at the catered lunch after the funeral, when she’d lost her favorite doll.
“Oh, I’m sure she’s not really lost,” he’d said, sitting in her father’s chair, across from her father’s wife, with a tiny plate of salmon on his lap from which he was laboriously picking the bones. “She’ll turn up, you’ll see. Know how I know?”
Grudgingly, the girl shook her head.
“It so happens I got a letter from her just the other day. What did you say her name was again?”
“Marguerite.”
“That’s what I thought. Yes, it was from her all right. Marguerite. She wrote to say that she was on vacation somewhere really nice, but planned to come home very soon.”
“Show me,” Olivia demanded unpleasantly. Her default mode, like her mother’s, was hardness, assertion. No doubt this would prove useful in the days ahead. “I want to see.”
“I’d love to show you, cookie. If I only had it with me.”
“Where is it?”
“Why, it’s on my desk back home, of course, with all my other important letters. Tell you what.” He ignored the disapproving looks he was getting from Sonya, who’d never been one for fantastical thinking. “I’m going home tomorrow. How about if I forward the letter to you when I get back? Would that be okay?”
The tight line of the girl’s mouth appeared to weaken. “I don’t think dolls even write letters,” she said.
“Sure they do.” Had he ever sent that letter? he wondered now. He’d been preoccupied at the time with his own grief and his own children and had failed to stay as close to Philip’s as he’d intended. Still, it wasn’t too late. Dear Olivia, he’d write the girl later, when he got home, I’m so sorry if my little vacation made you sad. I didn’t mean to go away for so long. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: sometimes even a doll gets tired of living in the same house all the time. The truth is, Olivia, even plastic people get worn-out sometimes, and feel the need for a break. But let’s talk about all this when we’re together again. Which I hope will be very soon…
“I’m coming,” he announced, to whoever might still be looking for him.
Making his way through the kitchen, he found the Dunns’ cat, a pendulous tabby, squinting up at him through vertical pupils from his seat by the cellar door. Teddy was not a cat person per se—given a choice, he preferred engagement and affection from the animal world; for silent self-sufficiency and languid indifference he had his daughters, he had his wife—but the wine he’d drunk and the imminence of food made him tender, expansive. He ran his palm over the fur, the scruffy neck, the bony brow, the moist rubbery seam on one ear, the scar of an old wound. The cat rose to his touch, arching and shuddering with a deep, languid pleasure, purring like a generator fed by some delirious current. Then, almost as an afterthought, the malicious little fucker reared around and bit him.
True, it wasn’t a proper bite, in that the skin, as Gail would point out later, wasn’t punctured. There was no blood and no pain. Only a vague, dreamy numbness, a sensation of distance. He recalled Livingstone’s account of being mauled by a lion: Like a patient watching his own surgery under chloroform. Not that this puny creature bore even the most vestigial and attenuated resemblance to a lion.
Still, all through dinner and dessert, his arm retained the impression of the animal’s fangs. Teddy waved it around, brandishing the marks like a license.
“Wait, do cats even have fangs?” Will asked. “I thought they were teeth.”
“Only until they sink into your skin. Then they become fangs.”
“How strange,” Fiona Dunn said. “He’s never done that before.” Her tone was musing, almost suspicious. Fiona was Gail’s partner, a specialist in property and divorce, sinewy and brittle and shrewd. Like all lawyers she was inclined to seek out precedents. “I can’t think of a single time.”
“Well, great,” Teddy said, “now that will be easy.”
“There’s not even any blood,” Gail observed. She sounded almost disappointed.
“I doubt poor old Rex is capable of drawing blood,” Alex said. “He’s, what, fifteen years old? He can hardly get down the stairs.”
“I’ve got news for you,” Teddy said. “Old Rex is healthier than you think. He’s got the jaws of a lion.”
“I think you’ve made your point,” Gail said.
“Poor baby.” Fiona held up the wine bottle. “Will this help?”
“God, yes.” The problem with other people’s pain, Teddy reflected wistfully, was that it was fundamentally boring, like other people’s dreams. There was no way to convey it that would make it feel real. “Pour away. Is that the wine I brought?”
“I have no idea. Was yours red or white?”
“Never mind.”
“I can’t drink red wine,” Carol Dennis put in. “It gives me headaches.”
“Me too,” Gail said.
“We have to finish this bottle,” said Alex. “It’s no good having leftover wine. The damn cork never goes back in.”
“That’s why I like screwtops,” Will said.
“Oh, you’re hopeless,” Carol said in an odd, high-pitched voice. “You haven’t the mistiest notion of civilization.”
“That’s from this old movie we just saw,” Will explained. “What was the name of that thing, hon?”
“Search me.”
“This big industrialist, he retires early and goes off to Europe. But his wife keeps stepping out on him with younger men…”
“Dodsworth,” Alex said, between yawns.
Will glared at him.
“C’mon, it’s a classic.”
Teddy pushed back his chair. “Now where are you going?” Gail asked.
“Be right back.”
She nodded, unsurprised. He was known for his turbulent stomach.
Going through the kitchen, he saw all the corn husks, the squeezed-out limes, the congealing oil rings and moldering cheese. It was an occasion for wonder, how so few people, in the satisfaction of such prosaic appetites, could leave so much detritus behind.
And lo, in the Dunns’ burgundy-colored bathroom, the intrepid explorer was rewarded for going forth. For there, in a brief but thorough survey of the medicine cabinet, he discovered the bottle of Percocet left over from Alex’s hernia operation the previous March.
He swallowed two pills down dry, then sat on the toilet leafing through magazines, waiting for something good to happen. It took a while. The scent of potpourri, of stiffened petals and spiced herbs, filled the room. Down the hall he could hear Gail’s low, confiding voice, “…the eternal husband. Every night in bed. You wouldn’t believe how good it is…”
Sometimes his love for his wife and the need to distance himself from the sound of her voice occupied roughly the same space in Teddy’s chest. He was not, he knew, the eternal husband; it was the name of a book by Dostoyevsky. With books as with legal cases, Gail preferred the strays. The minor ones, the difficult ones, the foreigners, the underdogs, the overlooked. Between her books and his you could hardly move around the bedroom at this point. But then books and marriages were well suited to each other, Teddy thought. Both were middle-class adventures: they conspired to keep you at home, sitting still, being good. Meanwhile the mind went sneaking off under cover of darkness, traveling the world, kissing strangers in parking lots, suffering torments and temptations no one could see.
It was what Philip used to call an unfunny paradox. After two decades as a therapist in Boston, Philip knew a lot about paradox. But Philip was dead. That was a paradox too.
Meanwhile Teddy could still hear her voice, that distant, cellolike murmur, going on about that goddamned book. No one interrupted her. Why would they? She was known as a woman of mercurial enthusiasms; it was part of her charm. The way her face in company opened suddenly like a flower, inviting you to gaze, just for a moment, at the pollinated brightness inside. Men were always trying to figure her out, wondering if she were brilliant in a way they failed to apprehend. True, she was no longer beautiful: her ankles were thick, her breasts had fallen, her round expressive face gone webby with lines. But she had a loveliness, an aura, sidelong and intermittent, like the thrum of a hummingbird; it brushed against you and was gone. Teddy liked to think of her as the kind of woman other men went home and thought about while they lay with their wives. Even he thought about her that way sometimes, a woman he’d spied across the room at a party, all slender and bright. Did everyone think such thoughts about his spouse? Or was it only people like him thinking them about people like her, people who seem always to be thinking about something else?
“I’ve always preferred the friend of the family,” Alex was saying.
“Who wouldn’t?” Fiona said.
The weight of the cell phone in Teddy’s pocket was like a stone. He took it out and frowned at the blank window. It was like trying to read a broken compass.
He wished his daughters were around. For each other, if not for him. They were sisters; no matter how old they grew or how badly they got along or how widely they traveled, a few slimy fragments of the original eggshell would cling to their backs. You carried them with you, the whole cast of characters. And yourself too, he thought. Yourself too.
Personally he’d have liked to be free of him by now, that fat, angry kid who still shadowed his days, bouncing tennis balls off the ceilings, grabbing the biggest brownies on the plate, pitching fits over slights. Impossible to satisfy that kid. Always wanting and demanding. Forever getting banished from the dinner table, sent upstairs to sulk like Achilles amid the disorder of his room. Crybaby, the old man would yell after him, what are you even crying about, crybaby? What now? Do you even know?
At least Philip, like Jacob to his blundering Esau, had learned to avoid trouble, to be subtle and contained. While Teddy got sent home from school for talking back to teachers, and thrown out of the Indian Guides for errant marksmanship with arrows, and grounded for lighting up Marlboros in the basement, Philip went on quietly earning A’s, leading his Cub Scout troop to distinction, playing first trumpet in the marching band, and smoking good Colombian grass all through high school in his immaculate bedroom. Yes, Philip had learned to fly under the radar. Teddy had taken longer to wise up.
Sometimes he wondered if he’d wised up too well. The crybaby had been banished from the table for good. But who was left? He felt his adult will, his rage for order and peace, hardening around him, constricting his bones like a cast.
“You think you’re unique?” Philip would taunt—a real Hastings tradition, taunting the firstborn—when he aired such complaints. “You think you of all people should be spared the terrible fate?”
“Of getting old you mean?”
“Of becoming yourself. Your one and only self.”
“See, that’s the thing, Philip. One’s not enough.”
“Good. Glad to hear it. ’Cause it’s people like you who keep me in business. Thousands of dollars in my pocket every month because one’s not enough, Philip, I want to be more fulfilled, Philip. It never ends,” he said. “The single ones want a spouse. The childless ones want kids. The ones with kids are so overinvolved they’ve forgotten how to be adults. Somewhere between the nursery and sickroom they got themselves lost. Now they want to know why. They want more meaning. More direction.”
“So what do you tell them?”
“I tell them to get loster.”
“What kind of a shrink are you? People come to you because they’re in pain, and here you’re telling them to go off and make things worse.”
“Exactly,” Philip said. “Not that I’m anyone to talk. My idea of a big adventure these days is to take off in the middle of the day and go see a matinee down at Coolidge Corner. Some long, depressing, highbrow stuff in Danish or Farsi. I like to sit in the back row and fantasize how maybe that mysterious young Japanese woman across the aisle will come put her tongue in my mouth.”
“Jesus, Philip.” Of course the Carthage Twin did not play afternoon movies in any language. “I don’t have time for that shit.”
“So come up with something better. You’re more resourceful than I am anyway. Your problem is you don’t know it. Somehow you’ve decided I’m the existentialist and you’re the nice selfless responsible citizen. That’s what’s killing you.”
“But it’s true. You are selfish. I am more responsible.”
“No offense, Ted, but I liked you better when you were running around the woods like an Indian shooting off those plastic arrows of yours. You used to beat me up for snoring at night, remember? Of course it was you that snored, but that’s okay, I didn’t mind. At least it was the real, genuine, aggressive you. Now you’re Mr. Goody Good, Mr. School Principal, Mr. Town Selectman, and what do you do? You beat yourself up. You call that progress? You think it makes dear old mom and dad, down in their graves, approve of you now? I bet you don’t even jerk off anymore, do you?”
“That’s a bet you’d lose, Bro.”
“Yeah, but how guilty do you feel after?”
Now, whether as a tribute to his late brother or as an insult to himself, or because he could think of no better way to pass so much time slumped on the toilet, Teddy went ahead and jerked off—a desultory little self-encounter that took all of two minutes and ended unsatisfactorily. He stood, hollow and light-headed, and zipped up his pants. The water in the toilet was pink for some reason. Away it went. Away the pale, gluey semen, spiraling and formless; he washed his hands of it completely. Back in the dining room, voices were rising in laughter. How long had he been gone? He turned off the light and followed the sound down the corridor to its source. It was like following a rope out of a cave.
“It’s this Israeli boy,” Gail was saying when he got back to the table. “Gabi. He just got out of the army. He’s on his way to Africa, she says.”
“Who?” Teddy asked.
“Nobody.” A membrane flicked over her eyes like a curtain. “Someone you don’t know.”
“Speaking of Africa,” Alex said, “I hear the Lions Club’s going this summer. There’s an article in the Courier. They’re going to build a school.”
“A worthy endeavor,” Fiona said drily.
“Don’t you find it offensive,” said Carol, “the way we talk about Africa like it’s all one place? It’s got like forty different countries in it.”
“Fifty-six,” Fiona said. “Jeremy did a report.”
“Wait, the Lions?” Will said. “Are those the guys with the party hats who drive those wacky little cars in parades?”
“Those are the Shriners,” Fiona said. “And they’re called fezzes.”
“Maybe I should volunteer,” Teddy said. “I could use a new project.”
“You’ve already built a school,” Gail reminded him. “You’ve been building that school for twenty-five years.”
“This would be literally though. Hammers and bricks. Rebar.”
“I don’t see the difference,” she said.
“My sister went to Guatemala last year,” Carol said, “with this Habitat group from Oregon? They built a whole house.”
“Don’t forget that environmental studies person she met down there,” Will said. “Ethan something.”
“I told you, they didn’t have sex. They just fell asleep in the same bed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve always dreamed of sleeping with an environmental studies person.” Alex was playing with a bit of candle wax, rubbing it into a ball. “Out under the canopy, with all the flora and the fauna.”
Fiona smiled coolly, flexing a bone in her wrist.
“It’s funny,” Carol said, “the trip only lasted a week. But she talks about it like it was the most intense experience she ever had. She almost didn’t come back, she said.”
“That’s not funny,” her husband said, “it’s sad. One week in the third world, she hammers some nails in a board, sleeps with a man she doesn’t know, and that’s how she makes a difference?”
“You’re right,” Carol said. “Absolutely. It’s a lot better sitting around watching old movies on TV.”
“Why didn’t she stay?” Teddy asked.
“There was a sale at Filene’s!” Will cried. “What do you mean, why didn’t she stay? This is her sister we’re talking about. The woman lives on sushi and lattes. She’s got a four-hundred-thousand-dollar house in Portland with radiant heating and cathedral ceilings. Also, I might add, a husband and two kids. How long do you think she’d last down there on her own, going off to the outhouse after another meal of plantains and curried goat?”
“So I take it you’re not signing up for this Africa thing then,” Alex said.
“Sue me. I’m a nonconformist. You all go ahead. I’ll tend the home fires.”
“I don’t know,” said Carol vaguely, stubbornly. For all her mildness of manner, you could see how she could wear a man out. “There was something in her face when she got off the plane. I don’t know what to call it. She hardly knew who I was.”
Teddy looked up from his plate. “I’m trying to remember the last time I had an intense experience.”
“How about sex with your wife,” Gail suggested. “Or doesn’t that one time count?”
She was regarding him as she had in the car, from the cool, shadowed side of her lonely planet. He could hardly bear the weight of her appraisal. He thought of what he’d seen in the bathroom just now when he had stood up from the toilet—what his body was doing to itself—and a knot of bile formed in his throat. His eyes filled with tears again. Crybaby!
He drained what was left of his wine—quite a lot actually—and set down his glass, which rang unpleasantly against the plate. He glanced down to discover he’d broken the stem in two.
“Jesus,” he said. “How do you like that.”
“Oh,” Fiona said, “they were cheap glasses anyway. Now I’ve got an excuse to replace them.”
“So I’ve done you a favor then? Is that what you’re saying?” Dregs of sediment and cork were lodged in his teeth. “You’re happy I broke it?”
“You’re shouting,” Gail said quietly. “You’re now officially shouting at our dearest friends, who are trying to make allowances.”
“Allowances? Allowances for what?”
“Just stop, okay?”
“Fine. I’ll stop. Okay? I’m stopping.”
“How you like those Sox this year?” Alex piped in. “Are they something or what?”
“The thing is, though, Gail,” Teddy said, “I don’t really feel like stopping. I’m tired of stopping. Stopping is something I’m good at.”
“Not right now you’re not.”
“True, but in general. In general, all in all, I’m a pretty good stopper. Pretty controlled, pretty restrained. But here’s the thing. What if a guy gets too restrained? What if he gets so restrained, he can’t even remember what he’s restraining from? What happens then?”
Gail sighed. “You know what happens then, Pooh Bear. He says good night and goes home to bed, and then the next day he makes an appointment with a licensed therapist.”
“Take your pal Dostoyevsky,” he went on airily, and with a peculiar exaltation; if he’d had another wineglass in his hand he’d have broken that too. “Not a hell of a lot of restraint there. Of course he had his reasons, didn’t he? They say his old man was murdered by his own peasants. Strangled. Isn’t that right, Alex? Tell her. You’re the humanist.”
“Actually I think they crushed his testicles.”
“Good story,” Fiona said. “Any others you boys want to share over dessert?”
“The point is,” Teddy said, “you can’t deny your own nature. Even if your own nature is terribly flawed. Even if it’s ugly or annoying or hurtful to others.”
“How about all three?”
“In Africa they let the big cats roar. Here we cage them up in the house. No wonder they want to bite us.”
“Again with the cat?” Alex lifted his eyebrows. “I thought he didn’t even break the skin.”
“There are cuts you don’t see. By the way, Alex, you’ve got a hell of a living room in there, have I ever told you that? Nice stuff. I like nice stuff.”
“I know you do, Ted.”
“You should see my TV at home. Thirty-two inches. Flat-screen. Hi-def. Five-comb filter for clarity of image. You talk about your resolution. Six ninety-nine plus tax. I went to Best Buy.”
“Sounds like money well spent.” Alex glanced over at Gail; his expression didn’t change. “There’s no shame in treating yourself to something nice, Ted. You’ve worked hard for a long time.”
“Who’s to say?” Teddy gestured expansively toward the windows, slung with lace, and the dark trees beyond them, growing taller and wilder as the season progressed. “The bedouins have a proverb: whatever we don’t need is an encumbrance.”
“Oh boy,” Will said, “here we go again. Across the desert sands.”
“The sedentary species, they don’t hold up, do they, Alex? You’ve read the history. It’s the movers that survive. The nomads, the bush people. The skinny guys who travel light and sing their way across the desert. The fat guys who sit around waiting for the next world? They all wind up buried in sand.”
“It’s late,” Gail said. “Hey, big cat, what do you say? Let’s call it a night.”
“Fine. I’ll just use the bathroom.”
“Again?”
“Last time.”
His second trip to the bathroom that evening, though shorter than the first, proved eventful in its way. Coming out, after drying his hands on the little towels and checking his fly, he overheard Gail say, “…even Bruno keeps his distance.”
“Really?”
“I guess animals sense these things.”
“Wives too,” he heard Fiona murmur, in her insinuating purr.
“Tell me,” Gail said on the way home.
“I’m fine.”
“No you’re not.” She adjusted the vent, trying to coax out a little heat. “You skipped right over fine. You went straight from being weird and quiet to completely wigging out. Was it that business with the cat? I took it too far, didn’t I? I must have been mad at you for some reason.”
“Don’t give it a thought,” he said. “I had a perfectly good time.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t either.” She sighed. “I don’t know what it was. I kept going on about that stupid novel, and everyone just kept sitting there staring at me, and I kept thinking about how hard I was working to sound interesting, and how they were all probably thinking, ‘My God, look at her, she’s put on all that weight.’ And Fiona overcooked the fish, as usual. What a shame, that beautiful creature, grilled to death, and no pleasure in eating it at all.”
“You had a lot of wine,” Teddy observed mildly. “We all did. Anyway I’m the one who broke the glass.”
“You should have broken them all. It turned out to be the highlight of the evening.”
“Next time I will.”
The wine, the semen, the blood he’d glimpsed swirling darkly in the bowl—all the evening’s currents swam together in his mind. But he wouldn’t say anything to Gail. There were doers and complainers. He knew on which team a man should play.
“That wine you bought, with the red label? Did you ever get to try it?”
“No. Did you?”
She nodded. “Oh, it was wonderful. You did a wonderful, wonderful job. Sometimes, you know, Bear, I think you’re a better man than you even know. You know?”
He nodded. Gail was a cheap date; two glasses of wine and her syntax left the building. And yet he did know what she meant. He felt a luminous alertness, like the flash of a scoreboard in the late innings of a game. Somehow he had squeezed out a victory. He’d done away with that tiresome rival, her husband. Smashed him like a glass. And now they were making their escape from the wreckage, so something new could begin.
He looked out at the dark houses along the road, night’s black curtain suspended overhead. If only they could continue on this way, and not pull up into the same old driveway, get into the same old bed. He remembered that night in the parking lot with Vera Blackburn, his sense, driving home, that his neighbors were looking down at him from their illuminated windows not with rancor but approval. As if they’d been the ones making him do it. As if, after two hours in a hot auditorium, they’d all been expelled out into the darkness with the same secret disturbance of the nerves, the same need to keep the show going, the wild tropical night with its lovable rogues and gamblers, its errant missionaries. I can never fit the cork back in the damned bottle…
“I’m on my period,” Gail said, “but I’m thinking I’d like to have a little fun when we get home. What say you to that?”
“I’d like to have a little fun too.”
“A little good clean perimenopausal fun at the Hastings establishment.”
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll go with the flow.”
She gave a low, voluptuous laugh. Like all women, she was accustomed to flux, to sudden eruptions and cessations, the pull of unseen tides. For men it was different. The sight of one’s own blood, for example, in the toilet bowl, the crimson drops unfurling like jellyfish when they hit the water—at such times a certain terror prevailed.
“Did you know Mimi’s been going out with Jeremy Dunn? They’ve been seeing each other for weeks.”
“Christ. I had no idea.”
“I just found out myself,” she said. “Fiona let it slip in the kitchen. He swore her to secrecy.”
“She’ll get bored with him. She always does.”
“Jeremy’s a little prince. They’ve spoiled him terribly. I can’t see it lasting. But it might.” Gail looked out the window. “Does your arm still hurt?”
“Not so much.”
“I shouldn’t have teased you. I know you have a low threshold.”
“Forget it,” he said. “I hardly feel a thing.”