I don’t care, and then without any warning or preamble, no lump in her throat, no twitch of her lip, not the single sob that heralds the onset of a good cry, Bunny is weeping in the curious way she’s been weeping as of late. Without sound, without so much as a sniffle, her face is impassive, her eyes open and her stare as blank as that of a glass-eyed doll. The tears come, not in teardrops that roll down her cheeks like raindrops on a windowpane, but like water when a faucet is turned on all the way. The copiousness of her tears is remarkable, and equally remarkable is how, snap! just like that, the tears stop. By the time Albie returns from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee, it’s all over, as if there had been a sun shower, except without any sun.
“You made coffee?” Bunny says.
“You said you wanted coffee. Three minutes ago, you said you wanted coffee.”
“I did? What time is it?”
Before he can check his watch, Albie sets the two coffee mugs on the coffee table, which isn’t really a coffee table. It’s an old steamer trunk that serves as a coffee table. “It’s nine minutes past ten,” he says, and he slides the ashtray, filled with tar-stained filters and ash and one cigarette that is broken in half, to the far end of the trunk. One of the mugs, the one Albie sets closest to Bunny, is a souvenir mug from St. Thomas, white industrial ceramic adorned with a blue sailboat. As if she were about to reach for it, which she is not, Albie says, “Be careful. It’s hot.”
Instead of seating himself again on the edge of the couch, Albie sits on the other side of the coffee table in one of two mismatched chairs that are arranged for easy conversation; not that he harbors any illusions of engaging in easy conversation. Hanging on the wall to his left is a professionally framed black-and-white photograph of children in ballet costumes that is, in fact, quite brilliant. Bunny got the photograph at the same thrift store as the pair of paint-by-numbers—swans on a lake—that hang vertically alongside the photograph. Also hanging on that wall are the two paintings—both bright swirls of textured colors—they bought years ago at a small gallery because the artist is a friend, which is to say they don’t like the paintings, but they don’t hate them, either. They also own a cuckoo-looking collage—a chicken drawn with crayon on a torn sheet of old newspaper, bits of fabric and string for feathers—which hangs in her office. Her office is the second bedroom in their two-bedroom, fourth-floor apartment. The other walls in the living room, floor to ceiling, are lined with bookshelves. Behind the chair where Albie is seated are three windows. The sheer white curtains are no longer bright white. They never bought anything like a bedroom set or a dining room table with matching chairs. All of their furniture and household goods—dishes and silverware—were things picked up piecemeal at flea markets and junk shops or low-end antique stores. Except for the fact that it’s a co-op, which they now own outright, having long since paid off the mortgage, their apartment is emblematic of the lack of maturity in the way that Bunny and Albie live their lives. Bunny is forty-three years old; Albie is forty-five, but there is little to indicate that adults live here, and not graduate students. They don’t own a car or a summerhouse or have children. These deprivations, such as they are deprivations, are by choice, and not the result of frugality. So what, then, do they do with their money? They pay their bills; they make monthly charitable donations; and after that, they pretty much just piss it away.
Although she makes no move to reach for the coffee mug emblazoned with the blue sailboat, Bunny eyeballs it with suspicion, hostility even, as if to say, “What is that doing on our coffee table?” Neither she nor Albie—neither together nor apart—have ever been to St. Thomas. For starters, Bunny has a thing, a big thing, against sand, and Albie prefers not to go anywhere if to go includes staying overnight or flying. When Bunny travels, sometimes for work, to give readings, to sit on panels, or for pleasure because Bunny likes to see the world, she would go with Stella or alone. Albie has always encouraged Bunny to travel because he likes her to do whatever she wants to do, and because he doesn’t at all mind time to himself. Now, she asks about the coffee mug. “Where did that come from?”
In yet another attempt, needless to say in vain, to get Bunny to lighten up, Albie says, “St. Thomas.” As if there were any light left in her, which there’s not. Or, at least none in evidence.
“I meant here. Where was it?”
“I don’t know,” Albie says. “It was in the cabinet.”
“Which cabinet?”
“The cabinet with all the other coffee mugs.”
“Have we had it a long time?”
“I don’t know.” Albie is good man, but he is not a saint. He gets exasperated the same as anyone would. “It’s a coffee mug. Who cares?”
It’s a coffee mug. Who cares? There’s no need to reply to what is a rhetorical question, but for the record—he cares, to the degree that his coffee mug is his coffee mug. Albie’s coffee mug was a gift from Bunny, a Valentine’s Day gift, a Valentine’s Day gift from so long ago that the bright red hearts have faded to a pale pink, but he’s been known to wander around the kitchen asking, “Where’s my coffee mug? Did you see my coffee mug?” When Bunny would then take it from the dishwasher, Albie would be visibly relieved as if it were a critical document or something of great value that he thought he’d lost. Albie has no disdain for cheap sentiment when it’s sincere.
Albie’s a little nuts in his own right. But isn’t everyone?
Bunny used to have her own coffee mug, one that was hers alone. One of those personalized ones, with your name on it. Wildflowers against an all-black background except for the block of white where Francine was written in calligraphy with red glaze.
The Francine mug had been a birthday gift from her friend Stella. It came with a card that read: You put the fun in dysfunctional. Stella gave her this gift at least eight or nine years ago. Maybe even more. It broke one day in August. This past August, it broke.
To try to read the look on Bunny’s face is like trying to figure out what a napkin is thinking.
“Dawn,” Bunny says. “It was Dawn.”
“What was Dawn? What about her?” Albie asks. Dawn is Bunny’s sister. The younger one.
“They go to places like that, places with sand,” Bunny says. “Family resorts,” she emphasizes.
Although Bunny cannot remember what time it was six seconds ago, or what she had for lunch yesterday or the word “parachute” or the difference between a simile and a metaphor or her wedding anniversary or what year she graduated from high school or how old she was when her father died or who wrote Of Time and the River or the title of that Martin Amis novel that she adores, she somehow has managed to remember that it was Dawn who gave her the coffee mug from St. Thomas. Dawn and her husband have two children, a boy and a girl. Her husband owns a small surgical supply company, which is like a gift to Bunny who never tires of saying, “My sister’s husband sells bedpans.”
“Dawn gave me that coffee mug,” Bunny says, and Albie responds, “It’s the French Mocha Java.”