MY YEAR OF MOURNING was over, and I decided to mark the anniversary by treating myself to a doughnut.
By my own choice, I had not had sex with anyone during those twelve months. I’m not sure why I did that. Maybe it was out of respect for the woman I had lost, though she wouldn’t have wanted anything like that from me. My older brother is a monk, so maybe I was trying to prove I could keep up with him in the abstinence department. Or maybe I was just afraid I would meet someone I liked and sleep with her, then start to think about her all the time, then start to want to have children with her, and then she would be torn away from me and spirited off to some better world-if there is a better world-and that is not the kind of thing you want to go through twice in one year.
So on that wet September night my year of abstinence was finished, and I went out looking for a doughnut as a sort of offbeat celebration. That’s all, really. A doughnut says: Listen, for your eighty-five cents I’m going to give you a quick burst of feel-good. No soul connection. No quiet walks. No long foreplay sessions in a warm one-bedroom. No extinction of aloneness. No jealousy. No fights. No troubles. No risk.
On that night, the risk I thought I was willing to take extended only as far as chocolate-glazed. Steaming cup of decaf next to it, little bit of cream, the shabby comfort of my favorite doughnut shop. It seemed a small enough thing to ask, after the year I’d seen.
The steady rain that had been falling during the afternoon and early part of the night had quieted to a light drizzle. The streets were black and wet, streaked with color from storefront neon and traffic lights. I worked my old pickup out of its parking space-foolish move, giving up a parking space in that neighborhood at that late hour-and drove to Betty’s.
There is no Betty. Once there might have been, but at that point Betty’s was owned by Carmine Asalapolous, a rough-edged, middle-aged man who had told me once that he wished he’d done something heroic in his life so he’d have a piece of high ground to fall back on when the devils of self-doubt were after him. Carmine, I said, just being a decent person, good father, excellent doughnut-maker-that’s enough heroism for one life. But he shook his big head sadly and said no, it wasn’t, not for him.
Carmine went to a two-hour Orthodox service on Sunday mornings. During the week he liked to make off-color jokes with his regular customers. He had some kind of mindless prejudice against college professors, a scar between his eyebrows that looked like a percent sign, and two young daughters whom he adored and whose pictures and drawings were taped up on every vertical surface in Betty’s. He took his work seriously. If you got him going on the subject of doughnut-making, he’d tell you the chain doughnut shops used only the cheapest flour, which is why you left those places with a pasty aftertaste on your tongue.
I parked in front. The roof of Betty’s was dripping and one cold droplet caught me on the left ear as I walked in. I remember that odd detail. In line at the counter I held a little debate with myself-how wild a night should it be?-then asked for two chocolate-glazed instead of one, a medium instead of a small decaf. Carmine was counting money in the floury kitchen. I could see him there through a sort of glassless window. He looked up at me from his stack of bills, pointed with his chin at the waitress’s back, and made a John Belushi face, pushing his lips to the side and lifting one eyebrow, the expression of a man who had not a millionth of a chance of ever touching the waitress in a way she liked, and knew it.
I carried my paper cup of coffee and paper plate with two doughnuts on it to a stool at a counter that looked out on Betty’s wet parking lot. In a minute a trim, balding man sat beside me, with a black coffee and the Sports section of the New York Times. “Nice truck,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“I saw you get out of it,” he said.
I could not think of any response to this.
He kept trying. He said: “You don’t see many of them still around. Fifty-one Dodge?”
“Forty-nine.”
“Gorgeous,” he said. “Like you.”
I looked away. I was waiting for my coffee to cool, and was not really in the mood to talk, and though I understand sexual loneliness as well as the next person, there was not much I could do about this man’s loneliness. Just at that exact moment-it was after midnight-a woman walked out of Betty’s carrying a small bag and got into her car and she must have had a slippery shoe or been distracted by something because she put her new Honda in reverse and drove it across about fifteen open feet of parking lot and straight into the back of my truck.
“Whoa!” the man beside me yelled.
I took a good hot sip of coffee. I watched the woman get out, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand and looking as if she wished she had never been born. And then, very calmly, I went outside to talk to her.
SHE WAS A NICE-LOOKING woman. Not very tall, thin, with large breasts under a gray cashmere sweater and wide hips and what looked like genuine cowboy boots on, and jeans. She wasn’t really dressed to be out in the rain, and she was coughing. I had my coffee cup in one hand and my first instinct was to offer her some because she looked so miserable there, in pain, upset at her bad luck, and sick besides.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Jake. That’s my truck you just mashed.”
She coughed and coughed and said how sorry she was.
I said it wasn’t the end of the world-a phrase I had been using with myself all year. She got out her registration and insurance papers and gave me her business card, and since I don’t have a business card, I wrote my name and number on the back of another one of hers and that was the end of it. Carmine had come out and was wielding an old golf club in case there was any trouble, which, of course, there wasn’t. Just before the woman ducked into her Honda, she swung her long black hair away from her face and looked at me. Thank you for not making a big deal about it, the look said. But Carmine interpreted it differently.
“You have the phone of this girl?” he asked, when she had driven away.
I said that I did. We were standing there side by side in the drizzle.
“Wait three days for the cold she has to go away, then call.”
I finished my coffee right there in the rain, and Carmine took the cup, and I went home and more or less straight to bed.
OVER THE NEXT FEW days it wasn’t easy to keep from thinking about the young woman in the cowboy boots because I used my truck for work and I liked to look at it from time to time to cheer myself up. It was an official antique, forest green, with a bright chrome grille and a handmade maple rack over the bed for lumber and ladders. Every time I looked at the truck from a certain angle I could see the broken taillights and dented fender and I wondered how hard it would be to get replacement parts and I thought about the black-haired woman coughing in the rain.
I didn’t mention her to anyone, not even to Gerard, who works with me and is closer to me than my own brother and sister. I waited three days-for her cold to go away and so as not to seem overly anxious-then dialed the number on her card.
“Hi,” I said. It was my lunch hour, I was calling on Gerard’s cell phone, because I didn’t own a cell phone anymore. I didn’t own a TV, either, or a microwave, or a single pneumatic nailing gun, even though I could have afforded those things. I was sitting on a set of exterior steps we’d built as part of a new addition to a professor’s house in Cambridge, tuna sandwich on my lap. “I’m Jake Entwhistle,” I said into the phone. “You mashed up my truck the other night in front of Betty’s.”
For a few seconds there was no reply. It sounded to me as though she was still coughing, but trying to stifle it. I pictured her turning her face away from the phone.
“The doughnut shop,” I suggested, when she didn’t speak.
“My insurance company should have sent you the papers by now.”
“I’m not calling about that. I’m calling to ask you out.”
“I’m at work,” she said.
This didn’t seem like a promising answer, but I kept trying: “A restaurant dinner, on me. Maybe a walk around the block afterwards if it’s a nice night and we get along.”
“Thank you, but I can’t,” she said. “And I’m very busy right now.”
“Alright.”
“You should get the insurance forms within a day.”
“Alright,” I said. “I’m not worried. It’s an old truck.”
“Good. Good-bye. Thank you anyway.”
“’Bye,” I said. I set Gerard’s phone down on the new stair tread, finished my sandwich, folded the wax paper up into a perfect square, and put it in my back pocket. I looked out at the neighborhood of neat, wood-frame houses with swing sets in their backyards. Eventually I stood up.
Instead of eating, Gerard was using the lunch hour to take a nap on the plywood subfloor of what would someday be the professor’s new bedroom. For a while I walked around, checking things that didn’t need to be checked, and at twelve-forty-five I went up and woke him. When he opened his eyes and saw me he said, “One more minute, Colonel, I was having the dream of dreams.”
Everything was the something of something with my friend. The dream of dreams, the woman of women, the divorce of divorces. He had a rough, honest-looking face, a difficult past, and the two sweetest young daughters in the world. In another minute he stood up, ate a pear, and we spent the afternoon cutting two-by-six studs for the walls of the upstairs rooms and nailing them in place.
“Let’s spruce things up, Colonel,” Gerard suggested at one point, because the two-by-sixes had been sawn from spruce trees.
“The professor would like that,” I said.
“The professor was in my dream. She was asking me to… well, I can’t say what she was asking me without the risk of offending community standards of decency.”
“We’re in a school zone, besides,” I said.
“The professor had given me a physics problem, I can say that much.”
“She’s a good professor. We like her particularly much.”
“Physics, biology, chemistry. All the sciences were involved. Latin, Spanish.”
“Italian?”
“Tongue of tongues.”
We went on for a while with this kind of nonsense, driving sixteenpenny nails one after the next through the sole plate and into the ends of the spruce two-by-sixes. When the walls were framed, and the light had softened to an early evening light, we packed our tools away in a safe place upstairs, stood around for a while looking at the work, asked each other what kind of plans we had for that night, shook hands, as we always did, and went home.
At home, I showered, made myself a supper of black beans, brown rice, red wine, and a Fudgsicle, and went into my studio to paint.
“Studio” is probably too fancy a word. I had a three-room, 1,300-square-foot apartment in an old factory building where people had at one time made shoes. There was a small kitchen, a bedroom almost completely filled by the bed and bureau, a bathroom with old-fashioned, six-sided white tiles on the floor, and a very large awkward room with four tall, thirty-two-paned factory windows-my studio. I had two easels set up there, racks for old paintings, and shelves with tubes of paint, cans of gesso, pencils and charcoal and pastel chalks, sketches, brushes, drop cloths to protect a floor that had been gouged and grooved by vibrating shoe machines a hundred years before, then more or less refinished.
In those days I was painting with oil on linen, and I liked to size the linen canvas myself with rabbit-skin glue, and then make a mix of titanium white gesso and a marble-dust filler and apply it in even strokes, all in one direction for the first layer, and then in the cross direction for the second. I liked to make the canvas frames by hand, cutting four pieces of poplar with my miter saw and joining them with mortise and tenon and pin. I painted fairly realistic portraits, of women mostly, but also of children and men. The people were sometimes purely imagined and sometimes based on actual people who had made some mark on my life, and often I stayed up very late working on them. Every eighteen months or so I had a gallery show and sold a few canvases for roughly what I would make in two weeks of carpentry.
I finished-or reached a stopping point-at eleven-thirty, cleaned up, and was in bed by midnight, when the phone rang.
I thought it was Gerard. In those days he often called me late at night to see how things had gone in the nonworking part of my day and to ask what supplies we might need from the lumberyard to start work the next morning. Another person would have waited until the next morning to talk about how things had gone, and asked about supplies in the afternoon when we were finished for the day. But Gerard could not be held to the standards of another person. He brought Virginia Woolf to work for lunch-hour reading. He liked to recite Latin poetry, by heart, sometimes shouting Lente, lente currite, noctis equi! out over the streets of Cambridge, Allston, or Beacon Hill from a three-story staging. He was addicted to doing research on his computer, and he’d talk for hours about supernovas and scuba equipment, the political situation in Kazakhstan, Tour de France champions, diseases of the beech tree, NASCAR standings. His interests were encyclopedic, his memory photographic, his sense of loyalty and need for affection without bounds. As a boy, his family life had been less than perfectly nurturing. As a young man, he’d dropped out of college-where we’d been friends-and then spent time in a hospital for bipolar problems. I had let him live at my place for a while between college and marriage. And later, I’d hired him to work with me, building additions, fire escapes, three-car garages, tearing out whole sections of houses that had gone rotten or been eaten away, and replacing them with plumb walls and level floors and neat interior woodwork. During the previous year-the Evil Year, I called it-he had paid me back with interest for whatever favors I’d done. So we had complex worlds swirling around in the alleys and avenues of our friendship-gratitude, shame, grief, old childhood wounds, new arguments, a speckled canvas of deep affection that we never talked about.
But it wasn’t Gerard’s voice in any case. The person on the line had the mother of all colds.
“It’s Janet,” she said. “Rossi.” She turned her mouth away from the phone to cough. “I’m sorry if I was rude today. It’s hard for me to talk at work.”
“You weren’t too rude.”
“I hope this isn’t too late to call. You were up this late at the doughnut shop, so I guessed you were a night person.”
“A night person and a day person,” I said. She coughed again and I was going to make a little remark about it, but my sense of humor can get strange sometimes when I’m nervous-I’ve been told that more than once-so I held back. “Where do you work?” I asked her. What I kept myself from saying was, “In which mine?”
“The governor’s office.”
“I saw him on the TV at O’Casey’s last week.”
“He’s running again, so things are a little hectic.”
He should run, I almost said, because I had some kind of instinctive, bone-and-blood dislike for the man, even though he’d been a decent governor up to that point. He should start running at the door of the State House and not stop until he gets to Ixtapa, I had an urge to say. But I was holding on to my comic side with both arms by then.
She said, “I called to see if the dinner invitation is still good.”
“Let me check the calendar.” I picked up my August National Geographic and made the pages flap. “I have a Friday in 2006,” I said. “November.”
“You’re paying me back.”
“Or this coming Friday night. Nothing between, I’m sorry to say… except this Saturday night. Also good.”
There was a long pause then. It wasn’t health-related.
“I can be a little goofy this late,” I said.
“Are you on something?”
“Paint fumes.”
“Oh.”
“That was a joke. There’s a new Vietnamese restaurant on Newbury Street. Diem Bo. It’s a great place if you like that food. Noodles and so on. Shrimp. That coffee they make with all the milk and sugar in it.”
“I love Vietnamese coffee.”
“Good. Seven o’clock okay?”
“Perfect.”
“Friday’s better, it’s sooner than Saturday. Friday okay? Meet you at Diem Bo?”
“Fine.”
“Good. It made me happy that you called.”
“I’ll see you Friday.”
We hung up and I lay awake for a long time, thinking I shouldn’t have said it made me happy that she’d called, then thinking it was alright. Thinking I wasn’t really ready to go on a date just yet, and then thinking I might be.
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOONS Gerard and I quit for the day at four o’clock and went to O’Casey’s for a drink. In addition to his other passions and talents, Gerard was a world-class bicyclist, and very careful about what he put into his body, so he usually had tomato juice with a twist of lime. I like beer but beer does not like me, so I usually had a glass of Merlot. Bub, the bartender, made no secret of the fact that he thought our choice of beverages unmanly. He called us “Red One” and “Red Two,” though Gerard is dark-haired, going bald, and my hair is the color of old hay.
“Good that you’re dating again,” Gerard said, when I told him about my plans for that evening. “I’ve been worried about your mental health… which is a subject I know something about.”
“Everything is a subject you know something about.”
I asked Bub for some Beer Nuts to go with the Merlot. He smirked.
“And Vietnamese is the right choice,” Gerard went on. “It’s sex food.”
“How do you figure?”
“Just is.”
“What’s love food?”
“Greek, naturally.”
I nodded. Gerard’s last name was Telesrokis. “What’s marriage food?”
“French. Or a steak house.”
“What’s Thai food, then?”
“Sex food, too. Kinky, though.”
“Chinese.”
“Chinese is old-fashioned courtship. Szechwan especially.”
“Alright.”
“Vietnamese is an excellent first date. In time, if things go well, you can progress to Greek or Thai, depending.”
“On?”
“The tastes and qualities of the woman involved. What she reads, for instance. How many languages she speaks.”
“What’s German food?” I asked him, because he had gotten married at a young age to a German woman named Anastasia and had his two beautiful girls-five-year-old twins-by her, and the breakup of that union had been so spectacularly awful for him and for Anastasia and for the twins that it hung around his neck like a great weight of guilt and hurt and he still talked about it too much.
“Heavy,” he said, without missing a beat. “Sticks to you.”
“Good. I’ll remember. Seeing the twins this weekend?”
“You should see your face when you ask about them, Colonel.” He looked up at the television screen, but he was not really paying attention to it. “You would be the father of fathers, you know that, don’t you?”
“You’re kicking my bruise.”
“Sometimes a bruise needs a good kick,” he said. “I’ll call you tonight, either just before midnight or just after.”
“Don’t.”
“I will, though. I know myself.”
AT FIVE MINUTES to seven I gave a dollar to the valet attendant at Diem Bo and straightened the lapels of my sport jacket. It was a beautiful September night, clear and warm, with enough summer still in it to make you believe the world was a good and happy place, and the couples you saw strolling on New-bury Street were destined for long peaceful lives together.
As I was walking up Diem Bo’s brick front steps, I was greeted by an imaginary messenger from the world of ugly thoughts. A troll, a goblin, an ugly little creature from the kingdom of fear. His message went something along the lines of: Why this again? But I knew why. For the previous twelve months I had been skating over the surface of things, and I worried that, if I kept at it too long, I’d end up like some of the guys I knew in the trades, plumbers and painters and masons-decent enough thirtyish and fortyish men who could not really carry on a conversation with a woman, and who skipped along from Monday Night Football to darts at the local pub to long days with the mortar and cinder blocks, or hammer and two-by-eights, and who were afraid to ever talk about anything more interesting than what had gone on last Thursday night in the pocket-billiards league, or the latest Red Sox game, or the last time they’d had a blow job.
I wasn’t like that. Gerard wasn’t like that. But Gerard, at least, had his children to keep him honest. I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day that what you’d told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You’d had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in a tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half what it could be.
I looked up from that pleasant thought, inside the door of Diem Bo now, and saw Janet Rossi at a window table halfway back in the room. There was a tall glass of iced coffee in front of her. I spend a lot of time looking at faces, and her face was not beautiful in the way models’ and actresses’ faces are supposed to be, but pretty in a way all her own: shining black hair, black eyes, a slightly bent nose, and a wide mouth. There was something-a kind of tough smartness maybe-shining quietly out from her. Instead of walking down the long narrow room, I waited for the hostess to come over and escort me, and I watched in the meantime. Janet put a handkerchief to her mouth and coughed. It was a lousy time of year for a cold.
She was wearing a black dress cut low enough to show the bones on the front of her chest. She smiled when I sat down, a large, even smile that lit up her eyes, one slightly crooked tooth upper left, one freckle beside her nose. I have funny hair, “awkward hair” my girlfriend Giselle used to call it, the kind that stands up too straight, so that if you cut it short like I do, it can look ragged and boyish. I thought Janet might be smiling at my hair but was too polite to say anything.
As I sat down I accidentally knocked a fork off the table. “So, how was your day, honey?” I said, after the noise of the clattering fork had died down in my mind. “Kids okay? Sitter come on time?”
She just looked at me and pushed the long black hair off her right cheekbone. She touched her thumb and middle finger to the iced-coffee glass. “You’re a little weird, aren’t you,” she said, in a tone that had a couple of spoonfuls of regret in it.
I shook my head. “A little nervous, that’s all. I’m not exactly Joe Date.”
“Joe Date?”
I felt like I had fallen on my knees in a puddle of mud, and now, to make up for it, I was falling on my chest, with a white shirt on. “How are you?” I asked.
“Fine. Are you insinuating you don’t go on many dates? Married or something?”
“Never married.”
She took a sip of her coffee. “Why? You’re what, about twenty-eight? Nice-looking.”
“Thirty,” I said. I had a glass of water up to my face for protection. I saw Jason or Dominick or Adam-who-will-be-your-serverperson, off at another table, and with all my heart I was willing him to come over and let-me-tell-you-about-tonight’s-specials. Janet had me pinned down with the black eyes. She coughed and tried to hold it in. She wanted an answer.
I moved my left foot and felt the fork down there. “I have seven kids out of wedlock,” I said. “That’s why. I’m up to my forehead in credit-card debt. I’m hyperactive. Women’s bodies make me uncomfortable. You’re nice-looking and not married either, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad person.”
She almost seemed to be smiling. She hadn’t gotten up and walked out, at least, leaving me to pay for her Vietnamese coffee.
“No.”
“Hi. I’m Brian and I’ll be your server tonight.”
“And just in time,” I said.
Brian was tall and wide-shouldered, handsome as a shirt model. He blinked twice and started to try to get us to buy drinks before we ate. I could see in his face and hear in his voice that he was the type of person who was nervous around people and pretended not to be. He’d built an elaborate personality over his nervousness. He’d developed an armor, an act, a defensive outgoingness. It was the kind of thing that made me dislike someone right away. And the name was no good, besides. One of God’s little jokes.
I said, “We’ll both have the special.”
“There are two specials tonight.”
“We’ll have one each.” I turned back to Janet. “Would you pick the appetizers and dessert?”
Jason went into one of the speeches he had memorized: “The appetizer special tonight is braised scallops in a lemon butter saffron sauce with shallots and thinly sliced Shiitake mushrooms, finished with a kumquat glaze.”
“We’ll try one,” Janet told him. “Two forks, please.”
I could tell by the way she said “forks” that she was a real Bostonian.
“I’ll have what she’s drinking,” I said.
Adam wrote this down and then began to tell us what the two dinner specials were. I put my hand on his arm. “We’ll have them,” I said. “One each. We’ve been married eight years, this is our anniversary, we’re trying to introduce some unpredictability into the relationship, so we don’t really want to know what we’re having, if that’s okay with you.”
Dominick looked at me earnestly. The menus were huge and he was awkward collecting them. “Anything to drink?” he asked.
“What she’s having.”
“Very good. I’ll be right back with the scallops. They’re excellent.”
“Sorry for giving you a hard time,” I said.
When he went away, Janet started to say something, but it turned into a deep, watery cough that sounded like it was shaking her body from bone marrow to skin. She excused herself and walked off to the bathroom carrying her purse. I watched her go.
I put my right hand in the pocket of my sport jacket. They were playing Beethoven quietly from small ceiling speakers, and I heard it as if from a childhood dream: my mother and father home from work and enjoying a drink, asparagus steaming, Beethoven on the tape player. I tried to calm down. I looked around at the other men at other tables. They seemed well groomed, with normal hair and good, white-collar careers, and a regular dating record, or a wife, or a steady girlfriend, or kids. No one else in Diem Bo was nervous. I tried doing a breathing exercise Gerard used before his bicycle races, but it made me dizzy so I stopped and stared out at Newbury Street over the top of my arm. When Janet had been gone twelve or fourteen minutes, Joshua brought the scallops. “And a Vietnamese iced coffee,” I said, pointing across the table at the tall glass.
“Very good,” he said.
Five or six minutes later he brought it. “How are the scallops?”
“I haven’t tried them yet.”
“Excellent.”
Two more minutes and I understood that Janet Rossi was not coming back. The part of me that had been against going out on a date again had been the correct part, and the little troll reappeared and started in on a not very nice line of I-told-you-so. In compensation, then, I developed a plan: I would eat all the food we had ordered, buy a thirty-dollar bottle of wine on the way home, and then put John Hiatt on my music machine pretty loud and drink and paint until I knew I could fall asleep. Sitting there, formulating that plan, I felt an old sourness rising. I began to feel sorry for myself in the most childish and brutal way, and though I knew from other times that it would pass, that it was only a little half-dry bloodstain on the shirtsleeve of my mind, I wet it and rubbed it and indulged it for a few more minutes until I saw Janet come out of the bathroom. At which point I started spooning scallops onto her dish like Joe Date.
She gave me a wary look, as if I was going to ask her about the coughing. But I had decided not to. Son of a doctor who had made sure my brother and sister and I weren’t squeamish about the body and its troubles, I wasn’t one of those people who are afraid of catching a cold. Though I’d noticed that several such people were sitting near us.
Before Janet started to eat, she took out a plastic container with several compartments in it, placed six different pills on the tablecloth, and swallowed them with water. It was easy to see that she was waiting for me to ask about them but I didn’t ask because I wanted everything to be alright then. I wanted to be with a woman and have no trouble between us, no jealousy, or anything like that, no sickness. Even just for one night I wanted that. She opened her purse again and snapped it closed, and when I didn’t mention the pills, she started to eat.
I said, “When I get nervous or when something really upsets me, I make goofy jokes. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. I would like to officially start over.”
She nodded and looked up.
“What kind of a day did you have, really?”
She swallowed. “Awful.”
“Why?”
“I’d rather not say. It has to do with the person I work for.”
“Which is who?”
“Which is the governor. It was on my card.”
“Of Massachusetts?”
Another nod.
“The famous Charlie Valvoline?”
Nod number three, and some little squirrel of bad feeling skittering across her cheekbones. “He hates that nickname. Could we talk about something else?”
“Sure. You start.”
The scallops were excellent, and there was something intimate about sharing them that way, and about not knowing what kind of main course Richard was going to bring us. Janet asked what I did for work, but I wasn’t really paying attention to the question because by then I was already beginning to get the sense that there was something vast and wrong in her life, some shadow so enormous that it covered her and me and half the tables in Diem Bo. It was in the movement of her eyes and hands, and in her voice-which was on the husky, throaty side, and resonated behind the bones of the middle of her face. The advantage to meeting and dating when you’re fifteen or seventeen or twenty is that, except in a few awful cases, there has not yet been too much trouble in your romantic life, or in your date’s. You might go through some kind of trouble like that later, together, but at least you start out more or less unscarred. But on dates as a something-less-than-young man, with a something-less-than-young woman, you could start out with someone who had already been through such horror and misery in other relationships that the hope and eagerness in her had been kicked to death before you even had your first kiss.
You could see it in some women’s eyes, in their posture. You could hear it in the way they talked: their pain quota had been filled, for life; there was only so far out into that naked middle ground they were ever going to let themselves go again, and who could blame them?
I wondered sometimes if women saw that in me.
But this was different. This trouble was immediate and oversized. It crept around in Janet’s voice, in the choreography of her hands-which were long-fingered, strong-looking, beautiful hands. I had just a flicker of a thought then that I should get away from that trouble, protect myself, make things easy. But it was attractive, too, in a strange way. My own troubles stirred and blinked in a bad sleep. They sensed a friend in the room.
“So what kind of work do you do?”
“I make things,” I said. “I make houses during the week. At night and on weekends, I make paintings.”
Eric was standing by the table. “If I remember this right,” he said, “the gentleman had the whole sea bass and the lady had the Duckling Saigon.”
“You nailed it,” I told him. “We’ll have a bottle of wine. The lady will tell you which one.”
Jared was happy we were having wine, and Janet ordered a bottle of Sardinian white with what sounded to me like perfect pronunciation and then, when he was gone and we were eating, she said she would give anything to be a person who made things. “I deal in fluff,” she said. “Image. Spin.” She coughed the wet, two-note cough. “Horseshit.”
“I’m totally fulfilled,” I said. “My life is superb. Which is why, the first time you saw me, I was out at midnight ordering two doughnuts by myself.”
Oscar brought the wine and presented it with a flourish. Janet looked at the label and said it was fine. “Can’t smell anything,” she said, and he said, “Very good,” and opened it like an Olympic champion.
“What hurts in your life?” she asked when we were alone again. I just looked at her. I just wanted Brian to stay away. I wanted the tables at Diem Bo to come with a sign like the ones hotel rooms come with and you can hang on the doorknob. Don’t Make Up The Bed.
“You want a joke?” I said. “Or do you want to go there that quick?”
“Alright. I can go there, but let’s finish the specials and then go there.”
“And in the meantime, what about those Red Sox, huh?”
“No.”
“Alright, how about this? In the meantime, what’s the shadow over you? What’s that pain?”
“A bad day at work.” She coughed and massaged the skin over her breastbone with three fingers, and I could tell she wanted off the subject. “What kind of paintings?” she said. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“Paintings where I’m trying to say something about life and death, and then at the last minute I chicken out.”
“People don’t want to hear about life and death,” she said.
“Of course not. Why would they?”
“They want to be entertained.”
“Which is where your boss comes in. The Wilbur Mills of Lynn Beach, caught with an escort service babe. Eating fried clams, if I remember correctly.”
The squirrel ran across her face again. “He’d been in a terrible marriage for years.”
“Even so. As a citizen of Massachusetts I felt personally embarrassed. I mean, the guy has to pay for a woman to eat clams with him? What kind of governor is that? Taxpayer money, besides.”
“He’s done some good things.”
“I know it. I just-”
Adam was advancing on our table. With both hands I waved him away. He smiled at me. He winked. Janet and I stopped talking about the governor and shared the food-I wasn’t afraid; I never got sick, almost never-and worked our way through the meal and the talk kind of easily. She had somehow taken my natural urge to be too polite-devastating on a first date-and shoved it over the side of the table. She went stretches of several minutes without coughing at all, then started in again. It didn’t seem too bad really, just the tail end of a nasty cold.
Instead of asking the usual questions about brothers and sisters and parents, she said, “Everyone has a mess in their family. What’s your mess?”
“I’m pretty sure my sister works as a kind of call girl in Reno. She says she does therapeutic massage, but I’m pretty sure she’s talking about a certain kind of therapeutic.”
“Really? Does she like it?”
“I never asked. She has some methedrine problems and that’s made her a little hard to talk to. Unless you talk very fast. My brother is a Trappist monk in northwestern Connecticut. To balance things out.”
“Nobody ever married.”
“Not yet. What’s your mess?”
“My father was working on the Mystic River Bridge and either fell off a staging or jumped. We were never sure. Thirteen years ago today, actually.”
“Sorry.”
She waved her fork. “He was a good man. I just try to remember the good things.”
On that hopeful note, Abraham returned and we ordered dessert from him the same way we had ordered the main courses. Janet said, “Fruit for me, if you have it. Sweet and no chocolate for the gentleman.”
With dessert we each had another Vietnamese coffee and the last of the wine and we scooted and slipped through the usual conversational alleys and came out okay. Even though she wanted to split it, I paid the check and put in a forty-dollar tip. I’m old-fashioned there: if you do the inviting, you do the paying. And I was in a mood to spend money outrageously. That happens to me sometimes. Walking away from an ATM machine once in Harvard Square I gave a hundred dollars to a street musician. Five new twenties in his hat. I’d had what people call a comfortable childhood, in what they call the middle class, and I’d built up a thriving little two-man carpentry business, and sold some paintings besides, and I had more money than I knew what to do with and it meant almost exactly nothing to me. During the meal, all the normal insecurities and self-consciousness of a first date had somehow been knocked away and, though I didn’t know why that was, I liked it and it made me reckless, nutty. Plus, it wasn’t Jeffrey’s fault that he was Brian.
When we walked out of Diem Bo I wasn’t nervous. It had rained most of that week but the night was unusually warm for September-hot, really-and I felt completely at ease in it, and with Janet, standing on the sidewalk watching women walking dogs, and couples holding hands, and men in suits on cell phones, and taxis and traffic lights, and a moon almost full, and the healthy brick facades of the townhouses there. Gerard and I had gutted a whole floor of one of those townhouses once, tearing out the old and putting in the new, and it had made us feel heroic, in spite of the parking problems.
I believe Janet felt at ease, too. She was standing close to me, and had draped a pretty striped sweater over her bare shoulders. We were looking away from each other, watching the parade of another city night.
Completely without having planned to do it, I said, “Would you want to go out on the river?”
She turned her face toward me and her eyes were slightly wide and it was easy to see that she’d had a little tickle of understanding what I’d meant, or had made a good guess, and the idea was exciting to her.
“I have a key to the BU boathouse. Have you ever been out in a racing shell? Would you want to?”
“Wouldn’t we need another seven or eight people to fill it up?”
“They have some that are made for two.”
“Are you going to drown me?”
“Not unless one of us makes a huge mistake.”
She moved her eyes in small jumps across my face, and I wondered if I’d pushed the elastic edges of our nice easiness too far too fast and it was going to break open and all the good air between and around us was going to rush off up Newbury Street. I stood still and let myself be looked at. In a situation like that, it is the next thing to impossible for a man to imagine the kind of fear a woman is capable of feeling. I knew that, at least. I knew there was no reason for her to be afraid in that way, and knew I couldn’t say so.
“How weird are you?” she asked. “Really.”
“Weird within normal boundaries.”
She looked at me for another five or six seconds.
“The water will be flat on a night like this. The moon’s almost full. I rowed four years in college, I even have a Head of the Charles medal, and I can give you a written guarantee you won’t fall in.”
“Is it hard exercise?”
“Not tonight.”
More of the dark eyes on me. I liked it. I was innocent, I was good. I had, for some reason, not even been having indecent thoughts. I wasn’t trying to charm her or seduce her or Joe Date her; I was just feeling something different, some freedom I didn’t usually feel on first dates, didn’t usually feel at all. Had never really felt, in fact.
She said, “Okay then.”
We rode in my dented old truck up Commonwealth Avenue, across the Boston University Bridge, and parked in a dirt lot on the other side of Memorial Drive. At the boathouse I used my key in the lock and then turned off the alarm inside and led her down a set of stairs into the concrete-floored, high-ceilinged bays where the long white shells lay on their racks and you could smell sweat and damp concrete and the river. “They used to be made of wood,” I said. “They were beautiful.”
But even made of carbon fiber, they were creatures to look at: sixty feet long, twenty inches wide, a foot deep, with quarter-inch-thick hulls and V-shaped aluminum riggers, and inside, intricately curved ribs and sleek seats on tracks and pairs of sneakers bolted in.
Janet ran her hands over the bow of a boat named Leila Sophia. She flipped the gate of one of the riggers gently back and forth so that it made a click-clack sound that echoed in the bays.
“They can go as fast as twelve miles an hour,” I told her, “which seems faster on water, much faster, and with eight oarsmen and a coxswain it can be seventeen or eighteen hundred pounds going across the water at that speed, no motor.”
We walked around to the other bay where the smaller boats were kept, singles and doubles and fours. She ran her hands over those, too, played with the oarlocks, peered up underneath them to get a sense of the way the ribs and seats were fashioned.
I hadn’t yet opened the big red garage door that led out onto the dock. Friend or no, keys or no, alarm code or no, I wasn’t supposed to be there at that hour. The head coach then, whose name was Jacques Florent, had been my coach ten years before, and sometimes I came in and helped him organize the two-thousand-meter races on Saturday mornings in May, or did a repair for free on the dock or on one of the weight benches. In exchange for that, he gave me a key and let me take a single out on Sunday afternoons in the warm months. Or let me come in and use the ergometers in the winter when the team wasn’t using them and when the streets were too icy for my regular morning run. But the shells were expensive, fragile as the skeleton of a sparrow, and taking them out on the river at night had never been mentioned as part of the deal. Not alone, not with a date you hardly knew. When you rowed in those boats you moved backwards across the surface of the water, so if something was coming downstream in the dark-a tree limb, an old tire-you wouldn’t know about it until it crashed through the ten-thousand-dollar bow and the river came pouring in.
But I watched Janet running the palms of her hands across the sleek bottom of a boat, and I watched her fingers-a mechanic’s fingers, a pianist’s-opening and snapping closed the delicate oarlock, and I decided it would be a foolish thing to back away from the river now. It called to me, same as always, the wet slide of time. I could smell it in the air that seeped under the big red door. I took off my sport jacket and laid it over one of the shells. She put her sweater over my jacket. When I unhitched the clasp and swung the door open-first one side and then the other-the moldy, silky air washed against my face. “Too bad you can’t smell the river,” I said.
“What does it smell like?”
“Old.”
I slid the scull most of the way out of its rack, told her to go to the other side and rest it on her shoulder. We walked it out and slowly down the dock to the edge of the water. On the dock it felt almost like a summer night. She was thin, as I have mentioned, but strong enough to push the weight of the boat up off her shoulder and straight over her head. She grabbed for a rib inside when I told her to, looked back at me to see if she was doing it right. Beneath the straps of her dark dress I could see the muscles of her shoulders flexing.
“Now roll it over and down against your hip, and hold it… You’ve done this before, haven’t you.”
“Never.”
“Well, you’re a natural then.”
She coughed. “I played a lot of sports as a girl.”
“Just sort of half lean over and half squat down and reach it out so the bottom doesn’t bump the edge of the dock.”
The hull just patted the flat water. “Perfect.”
She held the boat close while I fetched the four carbon fiber oars-works of art in red and white-and then laid their necks in the oarlocks and pushed two oars out over the starboard gunwale. A jet flew over us then, headed out from Logan in the darkness. I showed her how to step in, but something wrong happened. I had been almost completely paying attention, but one small part of me had been distracted by the jet or lost in a little dream. We were upstream, Janet and I, just floating, with the blades of the oars lying flat on the smooth water, somewhere up past the bridge. It was dark there along the bank, the black water glided past. On the opposite shore, cars went up and down Storrow Drive in the streetlights. The city hummed. But we were outside it, close to the breath of the world. We didn’t talk. In my little dream I heard the jet. And then I must not have been holding the gunwale firmly enough, or must have forgotten how unstable a scull seems the first time you set your standing weight in one. Or she must have leaned over too far. The boat wobbled, not that much really. But she panicked and tried to catch herself too quickly and the far gunwale slipped out of my fingers and she went over, knocking her shins on the hard edge of the boat, and making a big, loud, awful splash.
I waited about two heartbeats and then dove right across the boat and into the Charles after her, socks on, pants on, dress shirt on, the water dark and raw against my face and shoulders and chest, and then black and silky and unexpectedly warm from the week of rain.
I surfaced to the sound of Janet cursing. She seemed to be able to swim, at least. She wasn’t panicking, but her breaths were short little rips of air. The waves we had made were rolling out into the middle of the river, and the streetlights from Memorial Drive wavered on the broken surface. She was breathing hard and then not so hard and in between breaths she was cursing like a plumber. In a minute we were treading water close to each other. Everything below the top two feet was cold.
I said, “The good news is our shoes are on the dock, nice and dry. The bad news is my wallet’s in my back pocket.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said. And then: “You promised I wasn’t going to get wet.”
“I’ve stepped into boats thousands of times without that happening.”
“You wobbled it.”
“I had a tiny lapse. You overreacted.”
She coughed and spat, swam out away from me a few yards, and then rolled neatly onto her back. I rolled onto my back and floated, too, because it was turning out that I hadn’t really been ready to go on a date again after all, and had ruined it, and now there was nothing to do but ride it out and go home, and wait another month or two months or twelve months and try again. I could feel the dark current tugging us slowly downstream, but I let it take me, and I tried not to worry, and it seemed to me then, in spite of everything and everything, that I was rubbing the front of my body against some kind of holy moonlit wonder. I had been dragging myself through the days attached to a burlap sack full of bad history, of mourning, and somewhere in Diem Bo I had cut it loose. It was trying to reattach itself to me at that moment, but I wouldn’t let it. I was going to have one night of not feeling bad, no matter what happened with this girl.
I went back to treading water, my body turned away from the boathouse. Janet stopped floating, and treaded water, too. Her hair was slicked down on both sides of her face.
I edged over a bit closer: “I have towels at my place. I’ll make tea. You can take a hot shower.”
She coughed and coughed and said, “You didn’t do that on purpose, did you?”
“Absolutely and completely not.”
“Alright. I’m done being angry.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you with the hot shower and the tea.”
“Well, I’ve never been propositioned before in the middle of a river. It’s very romantic.”
Blue lights blinked behind us, scampering across the water. Before I could turn around she said, “The good news is the boat hasn’t floated away. The bad news is there are two policemen on the dock shining flashlights.”
THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO but swim back to the dock, climb out, and stand dripping and shivering on the boards.
“Nice night for a dip,” one of the officers said sarcastically. He was a BU policeman, portly and jowly, with big fleshy hands, one of which was wrapped around a three-foot-long flashlight. He was looking at Janet’s chest. Behind him, also looking at Janet, was a state trooper in his gray Stetson. When she’d been out of the water a minute or so, Janet had a terrible coughing fit, by far the worst of the night. She walked off to the side of the dock and spit loudly there, which only made me feel worse than I already felt. I was showing the officer my somewhat out-of-date, damp, Boston University Alumnus ID and explaining about my key, my very good friend Coach Florent, and our arrangement. But it is not easy to appear respectable when your clothes are dripping. And, to complicate matters, the officer was acting tough and all-business in front of the state trooper-making his mouth stern, glaring at me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows, and so on.
When Janet came back she put her arm inside my arm and said, in the direction of the trooper, “Allen?”
“It’s the governor’s girl,” he answered, not very nicely. “What’s this, a stunt to get votes?”
“No, a first date.”
“Another in an endless series,” the trooper said.
I looked at him then. The BU cop looked over his shoulder at him, and Janet was looking at him, and for a little empty stretch of seconds no one said anything. There had been a splash of meanness in his voice, and so much naked hurt that I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed for him or angry. Backlit by the boat-house lights he was still mostly standing in the shadows, his face and the whole front of him in the river darkness, big shoulders, big arms, a big neck, a posture of pure aggression.
I don’t like aggressive people. And when I’m even a little upset, I tend to say things without thinking about them first. So I said, “Why don’t you do something useful and get her a towel instead of making remarks?”
“What’s that?” the trooper demanded, though even with the gentle knock and squeak of the dock hinges and even with the cars humming past on Memorial Drive, there wasn’t a chance in a thousand he hadn’t heard me.
“There are towels inside. Why don’t you get her one instead of making remarks like that?”
It was a very hard look he fixed on me then. I looked back at him. The boathouse lights made a small fuzz at the edges of his shoulders. “Pass that over,” he said to the BU cop, and he took my ID and marched up through the bays. We could hear his boots on the steps, then the heavy wooden front door slamming closed.
Janet was shaking slightly, dripping wet, still holding on to my arm. Given what our outing on the river had turned into, that gesture seemed like an act of generosity on her part. “If you go up to the landing and turn right, there’s the women’s showers,” I said to her. “There should be towels in there. No one will mind.”
When I was alone with the officer, a motorboat with a bow light went slowly past and I walked back down to where the double scull was floating and held it out at arm’s length so the wake wouldn’t knock it against the edge of the dock. There was water in the bottom of the boat, three or four inches from when the gunwale had dipped under Janet’s weight. When the wake died down I took the oars out and set them aside on the dock and tilted the shell toward me. I splashed out some of the water, but it was still too heavy to lift alone. The college cop came over and squatted down near me. He smelled like cigarettes.
“How’d you feel about helping me get this out of the water?” I said.
“Bad back.”
“Alright. Maybe the trooper will help.”
“He going to find anything there when he puts your name in the computer?”
“No.”
“Kind of a dumb remark, wasn’t it?”
“His or mine?”
“Yours.”
“Sure. I do that.”
“Kind of a dumb stunt, too.” He gestured toward the boat.
“You ever been out on the river at night?”
He shook his head. I thought of telling him about when I was a junior and a senior and we had gone out on the Charles in eights in the dark. The captain those years was pre-med, and so was I. We had an organic chemistry lab that went until four o’clock twice a week, so afterwards we’d hurry over to the boat-house and change and go out at four-thirty and by five-thirty it would be black dark. Coach Florent had a spotlight on his launch. He’d ride along next to us and shine the spotlight on you to see how your technique was, to see if you were coasting at all in the middle of the tough pieces. He had a bullhorn. “Entwhistle!” he’d yell in his high squeaky voice. “Down and away with the hands! Come on, John! Down and away. Then stand on the catch! STAND ON IT, GODDAMN IT!”
Sometimes the air temperature would be twenty degrees. A coat of ice would form on the shafts of the oars. But after you’d been rowing hard for a while, everything except the skin of your face would be warm, and sometimes we’d go down into the basin and do thousand-meter pieces there, invisible in the black, cold night. You’d feel like you had skidded off the edge of the predictable world and were just out there where no one and nothing could see you.
But I decided it wasn’t a story the officer would appreciate. I splashed some more water out of the boat with one hand and waited.
Soon we could hear the trooper’s boots on the stairs, and then on the dock. We stood up. The trooper handed my ID to the BU cop and said, “Do what you want.”
“Look,” I said, as he was turning away. “She’s sick. She was shivering. I wasn’t trying to be a wise-ass, you just-”
“She’s the governor’s slut,” he said at me, in a voice that was hard as a punch. “Everybody who’s been anywhere near him knows that. Used goods.”
He turned and marched toward the light. We heard him trotting up the stairs, and then we heard the door again, and then the sound of the cruiser engine as he accelerated.
JANET AND I MANAGED to tip and splash almost all the water out of the boat. Once it was up on our shoulders, the officer gave her a hand with some of the weight, and then helped us set it on the rack. He stood by without saying anything as I locked the bay doors, and then he followed us upstairs and I reset the alarm and turned out the lights. Janet had taken a hot shower but had to put the wet black dress back on, and then her dry sweater over it. She was coughing every fifteen seconds or so, and I worried that the dip in the Charles had taken her bad cold and turned it into pneumonia. Folded up in one hand she was holding her wet black panties and bra, and the officer could not keep his eyes from going there. He asked if we needed a ride. When we said we didn’t, he told us to stay out of trouble, and wished us a good night, and, after one last look at Janet and what she was carrying, got into his white and blue college police car and drove back over the bridge.
We walked across the four lanes of Memorial Drive and climbed into the truck. I kept a long-sleeved jersey there for days when Gerard and I got rained on, and for times, after work, when I didn’t want to walk into a sandwich shop or a bar all sweat and sawdust. I stepped out of the truck again and changed my shirt, but I didn’t put my good sport coat back on. We closed the windows and turned up the heat. It was hard to shake the chill.
“Everything go alright with the state police?” Janet asked, when we were driving over the bridge.
“Fine,” I said. “No problem.”
“He was on the State House detail a few times.”
I was trying hard but I could not think of a good next thing to say. We stopped in a short line of red taillights near the end of the bridge, and it seemed to me that I could feel the roadway trembling. We could have looped around to the left there, back toward Diem Bo, where I supposed Janet had parked, or we could have turned right, toward my apartment. When the light changed I went straight.
“Amazing,” I said finally, “how one jerkoff can sour a mood.”
Janet watched me across the seat. “And we were having such a nice time,” she said. “Swimming and everything.”
I laughed. I was just driving aimlessly and she knew it. We were trying to get back to the place we had been in Diem Bo but I wasn’t sure anymore how we had gotten there, and my being not sure made her not sure, I could feel that. All the nice liquid easiness that had been swirling between us had somehow hardened up and cracked.
For a few minutes we drove around on the back roads of Brookline in an awkward silence and then I turned, for no particular reason, onto Beacon Street and headed toward Coolidge Corner. She broke the silence: “Did you mean what you said at the restaurant? About being afraid of women’s bodies?”
“Terrified.”
“Is that something I could help you with?”
Joe Date would have made a cool remark then. “Absolutely,” he would have said. Or: “I was hoping you’d offer.” Or: “I’m willing to give it another try. It’s important not to let your fears rule you.” But in order to make remarks like that when you want to make them, your mind has to be focused right on the there and then, and mine wasn’t. We were not far from the building-a three-story, redbrick townhouse-where I’d first made love with Giselle, and I was upset at myself for taking that route on that night, for being the kind of person who let the past haunt him, distant and recent, who let the remarks of jerkoffs cut and stick like bits of grit in raw flesh. For an hour there in Diem Bo and afterwards I had slipped free of all that.
We were driving past 1178 Beacon Street and I was smelling the lemon laundry soap on the sheets and Giselle was standing by the half-open Venetian blinds with no clothes on. I had made love with a short list of other women by that point-in college and afterwards-but I had not ever felt anything like what I’d felt with her on that night. I’m not talking just about the physical feelings. I think what happens when you make love is that you communicate with the other person through a thousand secret channels. Every place your skin touches her skin is another little conversation. You can’t control those things the way you try to control a regular conversation; you can’t decide what to say and what to keep from saying. It’s as if the hair on your arms and the skin of your shoulders and the bones of your legs all carry different bits of your whole history there inside the cells. Everything that has happened to you, every thought and feeling and hope and sorrow, it’s all stored there. When you put your body against someone else’s body the cells can’t help but talk to each other, see where they match up and don’t, make billions of calculations as to where your histories and dreams speak a common language, what might be the chances of a happy life for the two of you and your as yet unborn child. It’s biological, I think, and more than biological, part of the whole mysterious package that makes a pregnancy, or a friendship. That night, with Giselle, all the conversations were carried on without translation-at least it felt that way. In fact, later that same night I dreamt she had gotten pregnant, in spite of everything we were doing to prevent it. In time there would be other kinds of lovemaking. Our dreams and visions would veer off into sulky solitudes, but on that night I’d felt, for a while, that we weren’t completely separate souls, and that is not a feeling you forget.
I should have forgotten it, though, at least right then, because I almost waited too long before I turned and looked at Janet. I was shaking a little but I didn’t think she could see that. On her lap she held the damp pile of cotton.
“I live here near here,” I said. Just that clumsy.
And she nodded and watched me, black hair, black eyes, one freckle, very calm. She coughed, barely parting her lips and not bothering to cover her mouth.
“My two ex-wives and my aunt live with me, though, I should warn you. She’s a Tibetan Buddhist priest. We’ll have to be quiet so we don’t scandalize them.”
She kept looking at me. I studied the road, glanced over once.
“You’re nervous, right?”
“Little bit,” I said. “I haven’t had sex in over a year.”
“You’re joking.”
I shook my head. “That’s not something I would joke about.”
THERE WAS AN EMPTY parking space in front of my building, a phenomenon roughly as common as a full solar eclipse. On the stoop, hair in dreadlocks, one of the other tenants’ boyfriends sat quietly tapping a conga drum between his knees with just his fingertips. He looked up as we approached and said, “Two beautiful raats from de rivah.”
“You have no idea,” I told him, and then, “Let it go full blast, Eamon. No one in this neighborhood goes to bed before midnight on Friday.” So he smacked the drumskin hard for a dozen notes and Janet and I went through the heavy pine-and-glass door and up the stairs to that beat. Three nights, and she was breathing as if she’d run all the way from the boathouse. My hands weren’t exactly working perfectly, and my heart was banging around, and I scratched the keys on the face of the lock and dead-bolt some before I was able to push them in and open the door.
“Don’t turn on the lights,” she said, when I started to.
I closed the door and nipped the deadbolt, out of habit. “I’m all river water. I was going to jump in the shower.”
“Don’t.”
She dropped her sweater and wet underwear right there in the uncarpeted hallway. She tugged the jersey out of my pants, and I pulled it up and over my head and dropped it on top of her clothes. She put her hands on my belt buckle, then stopped, then unbuckled it, and stopped again. Faint light from the street pushed past the window shades in the bedroom and lit the open doorway there. The hallway was dark and so quiet I could hear our breathing.
“It wasn’t true,” she said, fixing her eyes on my eyes, “about the long series of first dates. He was a first date, a year ago. I wouldn’t go to bed with him, and he was like a ninth-grader about it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You know what I want,” she said.
“What?”
“Brutal honesty. Can we do that?”
“Sure.” I pushed the straps of her dress off her shoulders, but she held the material there, coughing, staring at me through the semidarkness. “Alright,” I said. “It mattered a little.”
“It was a lie.”
“Good. Can we keep all jerkoffs out of the conversation now?”
She nodded but held the dress against her body. I ran my fingertips down lightly and just brushed the tops of her breasts through the damp material.
“I have no diseases you can catch,” she said.
“Excellent.”
“I won’t get pregnant.”
“Alright. Information registered. I don’t want to talk.”
“I want to talk the whole time,” she said. “Every second. Keep the kisses short so I can talk in between, when I’m not coughing.”
I had not forgotten how to kiss. I leaned toward her and caught her open mouth with my mouth, and my whole body started in on a fast, small shaking. A few seconds of that sweetness, that thrill, that tremble, and she pulled away and coughed over my shoulder.
“That was nice,” she said.
“Shh! My aunt. My two exes.”
“Okay, sorry,” she whispered in my ear. And then, still whispering: “I want to come in the room where you paint.”
“I come in there all the time,” I whispered back. “It’s no big deal.”
She laughed, quietly, as if there were, in fact, relatives and ex-relatives lurking in the dim hallway, all the ghosts from our separate pasts hovering against the high factory ceiling, getting to know each other. We had our chests pressed together, but the damp dress was still glued to her.
“Time to take that off. You’re getting me all wet.”
“I’m getting you all wet?” She moved herself a few inches away from me so I could peel the material down off her chest and hips and thighs. I picked up my dry jersey and ran it gently over the skin where her dress had been, over two scars on her belly, shining in the half-light, over the bones at the front of her hips and down the front insides of her thighs. She had a beautiful body and was standing in the almost-darkness with her hands clasped on top of her head, making a soft vibrating noise in the back of her throat. I kept brushing her skin lightly with the balled-up jersey, keeping the buttons and the collar away so that only the softest cloth touched her. She was completely at ease like that, with her clothes off, and it seemed to me that no woman had ever been so naked with me, that it was impossible, almost inhuman, to be as naked as that. I don’t know why I felt this with her, it was just the person she was-I’d noticed it in the restaurant, and at the boat-house. The usual defenses weren’t there. You felt as though you could reach right inside her chest and explore her whole inner life and she wouldn’t fight about it, wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t worry. She asked me-just above a whisper-if I was afraid, and I told her I had never been so afraid.
“Turn around,” I said. “It’s an equal-opportunity shirt.”
The being afraid part was true. Other than that, I had no idea what I was saying. I had never run my shirt over a woman’s legs or the bones of her back in that way, not on my best night. When she coughed I could feel her back muscles clench, as if her whole body were being bent and bent.
“You are the nicest kind of weird,” she murmured.
I tossed the shirt backwards over my shoulder but by that time we had somehow moved a little ways down the hall so that the trajectory of the shirt took it right through the kitchen door. It landed on the table and knocked over a cereal box there. You could hear the box fall sideways with a bump and then the cereal spilling out onto the floor, one quick rush at first and then a slow dribble.
The noise made Janet spin around.
“It was just my shirt hitting the cereal,” I said. “Quaker Oats Granola. My aunt eats it before she goes to bed.”
With both hands she took hold of my head and pulled my face down against her chest. I planted circles of small kisses there, orbiting her nipples. When she began to cough, I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her against me as if I could infect her with my congenital good health.
“Mother of all colds,” I said, into her hot flesh. The skin between her breasts was saltier than it should have been, as if she had fallen into the ocean, not the river. As if she had not showered.
“It’s not a cold,” she said.
“Mother of all bronchitises.”
“You can’t catch what I have.”
“I’m not worried about catching it. I’m stronger than two oxes. I have the immune system of the gods.”
“You have your pants still on is what you have.”
“You’re naked enough for both of us.”
“Take them… off.”
Instead-I don’t know what was wrong with me-I picked her up the way firemen do, one forearm behind her legs, her midsection over my right shoulder, and carried her into the painting room. She was not heavy. There was an old backless couch against one wall, canvas green with beaten-up springs. She was laughing as I lay her down there.
“The pants,” she said, but then she started coughing again so I put the air conditioner on low to get some of the paint smell out. I unfolded a clean drop cloth and put it over her chest and hips and legs. I climbed in with her as if we were under a sheet.
She pulled my belt out of the loops and threw it on the floor, and then snapped open the button on my wet jeans, pulled the zipper down, and left her hands there. There was a shaft of filtered streetlight slanting in against the wall, and we were used to the dark by then, so I could make out the shape of her face, and see glints of light in her eyes. “Listen,” she said, her hands moving around inside my pants, her voice all naked earnestness. “I’m almost a hundred percent sure I can’t get pregnant, I mean it. And I can’t give you any kind of sickness, nothing. Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“And you weren’t lying about the year?”
“No.”
“And it wasn’t because there’s something wrong with you?”
“There’s plenty wrong with me, but no.”
She kissed me longer than the other kisses, then coughed over my shoulder again, that wet swampy two-note cough that seemed to echo and rumble in a wet barrel the size of the whole room. I didn’t care about the cough. I ran my fingers along her spine and shoulder blades. She had fine soft skin. She pulled away. She tugged my pants down, then brought one leg up, put her toes over the top of them, and pushed down until they were off my ankles. “Your underwear is wet,” she said, but I was past talking. It had been 381 days since I had done this and my heart was like a big wet fist slamming against the inside of my ribs. Lines of electricity were skittering across my lips. I moved my right hand down across the side of her hip and down against the wet slick heat between her legs. I could hear her breath change. She rolled half onto her back, half against the wall, and moved her legs apart a little and made the humming noise in the back of her mouth but I could see that her eyes were open. For a few seconds it was awkward. She squirmed and pushed away from the wall to get her back flat on the couch, she kicked at the drop cloth, but she never took her eyes off me. I moved my hand up, fingertips wet. She was yanking down on the elastic of my underwear with one hand. The air conditioner hummed. In the kitchen the phone rang once, went quiet, and then rang again and kept ringing until the machine clicked on. I moved on top of her with my weight on my elbows and I could see her eyes gleaming, fires in the night. In a whisper I wouldn’t have heard if her mouth wasn’t so close, three little puffs of speech that slipped out of her between the humming moans, I thought she said, “Don’t hurt me.”
And I thought, before I could no longer think, that there wasn’t a chance in a hundred million chances that I would.
IT HAS ALWAYS SEEMED to me that all the trouble between people, all the differences that cause trouble, go away with sleep. When you wake up there’s a little stretch of time, a few blurry seconds, when you’re separated by almost nothing. I fell asleep as soon as we’d finished making love. I woke up after a short while and Janet was on her back and I was on my side, half-leaning against her, and there was no trouble between us.
“You awake, Joe Date?” she asked quietly.
I said that I was. I said, “This is nice. But I have a perfectly good queen-sized bed in the other room and there’s not so much bad air from the paint and thinner.”
She seemed to have stopped coughing. “I don’t want to go in and disturb your exes.”
“No exes,” I said. “No ghosts in there.”
In the small bedroom, under the covers in the dark she said, “I miss the drop cloth, kind of. Propositioned in midriver. Sex under a drop cloth. It’s been different.”
She started coughing and it went on for more than a minute. I didn’t think she was going to stop. She got up and went into the bathroom. I heard her spit, and run the water, and spit again, and I could tell she was trying not to let me hear. When she was back under the sheet she lay quiet for a while. And then she said: “Attractive, isn’t it, the spitting girl.”
“I don’t care. There’s a plastic bucket in the kitchen. I’ll bring it in here so you don’t have to keep getting up all night.”
I brought the bucket in, with a dishtowel, and set it next to her side of the bed, wide awake now. She seemed wide awake, too. The clock beside her read 2:11.
We were lying side by side on our backs, a siren wailing blocks away. I put my left hand on the top of her hip bone, trying to signal, not necessarily that I wanted to make love again, but that I wanted to stay down there where we had gone, in that lost nation beyond the reach of words.
But then something came over me and I asked, “What’s making you cough like that?” because I believed, by then, that it wouldn’t spoil anything for me to ask it. Bad allergies, I thought. Or the tail end of pneumonia. Or some new flu from Thailand or Bali or central Australia.
She waited so long before answering that I thought she’d fallen back to sleep. I would have been perfectly happy not to know. She’d already told me I couldn’t catch it, and I trusted her, and I believe people should have their private places if they want them. But at last she said. “You get the prize, then.”
“Which?”
“The record for going the longest without asking. Also the record for kissing without asking, and not seeming like you were afraid.”
“My mother was a doctor. She dealt with sick people all day and caught a cold about once every twenty years and I’m the same way. Don’t answer about the cough if you don’t want to.”
But after another short silence, she told me the name of the disease she had. The sound of the two words sent a little terrifying thrill down my neck and across the skin of my arms, and I felt two reflexes, almost at the same time. I felt myself recoil away from her, and heard some interior voice trying to convince me there hadn’t been anything special about the night, that I didn’t really know her, or want to know her. There was a part of me that wanted no more sadness for a while. I didn’t know much about the disease but I knew it wasn’t good, and I understood then that the coughing and the pills weren’t just part of some passing inconvenience. Something inside me pulled away from that. And then something else washed me back. As a boy I had run away from things, from fights, from sadness. When my dad told me my favorite grandfather had passed away unexpectedly, my response was to sprint out the front door of our house and all the way up the street, trying to get away from that truth. When I broke off with my college girlfriend I did it from California, by mail, and only went to see her later, face to face, because she made me. But all that running had left me ashamed of myself, so ashamed that, as an adult, I cultivated the opposite reflex. When Gerard lost his mind for a while in college, I went to the psych ward every other day to visit him. When my father died, I was holding his hand. I helped break up a bad fight in downtown Boston late one night. When things went sour and then tragic with Giselle, I tried, in the most secret part of me, not to run from it but to stand there and face it and deal with it. And so, in the bed with Janet, I could feel the old urge to back away. And then something better, holding me.
She said, “Do you know anything about it?”
“Not much. I’ve heard the words. My mother would know, I’m sure. Tell me.”
So she spent ten minutes telling me. Which is not that easy a thing to do, talk about your terminal disease with someone you barely know, in bed, on your first night together. When she was finishing up, she felt awkward, I could tell from her voice, a little bit worried again that I might hurt her somehow. She rolled over and kissed me, and said she was sorry for running on like that, she had to go to sleep, we could talk about it in the morning if I wanted.
In a minute or two I felt her body relax. I lay awake with the side of my arm against her warm skin, trying to take in what she had told me, to make it more than just words, trying to stay there with the feelings in me. Not to pity, not to run, not to rescue just for the sake of convincing myself I was a good person. Not to lie to myself or to her in any way.
There had been something wonderful and unusual about that night. I tried, for a while, to understand it. Janet didn’t have a lot of the ordinary defenses, I said that already. I don’t mean she was totally unprotected. No one that smart is totally unprotected after about age four. But, in spite of what she had whispered in my ear, I believed she wasn’t really worried about being hurt. I thought then that what I felt in her, what was different about her, was some kind of monumental courage, a courage I could feel as clearly as if another creature lay breathing there between us in the bed. I lay awake for a while, just admiring it. In the middle of the first part of the lovemaking, she had taken my fingers pretty forcefully and run them across the wide, slightly depressed scars on her upper belly. And so while she was sleeping, I put my hand there again, and traced the taut skin, and then I fell asleep, too.
IN THE MORNING I woke up with no one beside me. I listened for Janet in the bathroom or in the kitchen but after a few seconds I knew the apartment was empty. I do not particularly enjoy the smell of day-old river water on my skin, so I got up. The plastic bucket was not where I had set it, and the dishtowel lay neatly folded on the side table as if it had not been used.
I do not like to stand in the shower a long time. I do not really like to shave, but I have been told I don’t look my best with a one- or two-day growth of beard. So I showered and shaved and put on a clean pair of jeans, a clean T-shirt from a road race in which I’d finished eighty-ninth that summer, and sneakers with no socks, and I went and stood in the sunlight in the painting room. The drop cloth had been neatly folded up, and the old green couch looked the way it always looked, as if nothing important had happened there. Light was pouring in through the tall windows, catching a glass jar of brushes just so. On the easel was a canvas I had been working, and though I don’t paint perfectly clear and representational paintings, it was easy enough to see that it was a portrait of a pretty blond woman, twenty-five or so, sitting at a table with a vase of lilies beside her left elbow, and a look of ease on her face, as if she had already accomplished the most important part of what she had been put on earth to accomplish, and was proud of that in a quiet way, and at peace with herself. As if she had learned not to run away from things. As if she believed those things held, within them, the answers to all the huge questions about how best to live out a human life. On that canvas I was trying to show that I loved this blond woman, and admired her, and I think I had accomplished that, or was beginning to accomplish it.
What probably did not show was that the woman was my mother.
I studied the canvas for some time, then went into the kitchen intending to clean up the spilled cereal. Janet had cleaned up the cereal and washed the bucket and leaned it in the sink to dry, and, behind the faucet, left a note in a precise printed hand.
Dear Joe Date. I’m sleeping with the governor. Safest sex only. My insistence on that makes him angry. I’ll stop if you ask me out again. If not, then thanks for a kind of weird but nice night. Janet. P.S. The painting is nice. The woman is beautiful.
I DON’T HAVE ANY Greek blood that I know of, but I seem to have some mysterious connection to Greek Americans. I don’t know why this is. The ones I’m friendly with have a real appreciation for food and friendship and loyalty, which strikes me as a healthy set of appreciations. Gerard was Greek. And Carmine Asalapolous, my doughnut-making friend. And half a block from my apartment was a loud little breakfast place I liked, Flash-in-the-Pan, which was run by Maria and Aristotle Reginidis, who probably had a few drops of Greek blood in them somewhere.
I went there that morning, with Janet’s note folded in my back pocket next to my still-damp wallet. For $3.99 you could get two sunny-side eggs with real home fries-the kind with a patchy soft frosting of paprika and oil and browned potato flesh-link sausages you could cut through with the edge of your fork, rye toast with butter, and with marmalade that came, not in plastic packets, but in a glass jar. Good coffee in heavy, thick-lipped cups. The silverware was also heavy, scarred with a million silvery scratches, and if you wanted, you could order a grilled bran muffin on the side, for your health… with a quarter-cup of whipped butter on top of it.
I liked the cheap framed photos of Greek temples on the walls, and the clean bathroom with un-painted-over graffiti (“U.S. Out of North America Now!” was my all-time favorite) and the fact that Maria and Ari’s beautiful green-eyed nine-year-old girl, Giana, sat at the cash register on days when she didn’t have school, making change with a serious face, like an adult. I liked, too, that Maria and Ari weren’t afraid to have the occasional little marital spat there behind the counter, as if they didn’t need to prove to each other that they had a good thing going on between them. It was the kind of marriage, and the kind of child, I’d hoped to have someday, when I had been planning for a marriage and children.
“The eggshill bucket is full! But why why why can’t you tik out the eggshill bucket when is full? Why?”
“See this!” Maria would yell back, decaf pot in one hand, regular in the other. “This is why. What’s more important, eggshell bucket or they get their coffee hot when the cup is empty?”
“My other wife could do both!”
Ari had not had any other wife, except in his imagination. They’d shake their heads, mutter in some ancient Kalamata dialect, fuss and fume for a while. Sometimes, rather than sitting there in polite embarrassment, one of the regular customers at the counter would take sides and say something like, “My wife can do both, you know, Maria.”
“Good,” Maria would say. “Send her in.”
Half an hour later she’d squeeze past Aristotle at the grill and lay a hand on his aproned ass.
It was not the kind of food, or the kind of show, you could get in the hotel restaurants, or the chains, where the first commandment was never to seem actually human. Thou shalt not offend the customer’s sensibilities under any circumstances. Thou shalt not laugh or shout.
The country was going that way, it seemed to me. Political figures got hundred-dollar haircuts and e-mailed their spin doctors to find out how to say good morning to their children. Our governor, for example, was a clean-faced millionaire with a plastic smile who was trying, that month, to get back the authority to execute criminals because he wanted more than anything to be reelected, and his opponent talked tough on crime, so he had to appear tough on crime, too. He had done some good things, as Janet said, getting poor kids access to better health care, for example, and fixing up some schools. He knew he had the vote of the more compassionate types, and he was trying to steal a few percentage points from his opponent, who would have executed people without benefit of trial if he’d been allowed to. Four years earlier this same man, our governor, had been photographed-by a newspaper reporter-having a nasty argument over fried clams on Lynn Beach with a young woman not his wife, and had made up an absurd story, told a few plastic jokes, posed repeatedly with his two teenage daughters, given blood, gone to church with the cameras on him, and been reelected two months before his wife filed for divorce. His picture was always in the newspaper and on the TV, his voice was everywhere. I had never liked the man.
When I had eaten half my eggs and potatoes and finished my first cup of coffee, I took Janet’s note out of my pocket. I unfolded it, smoothed out the wrinkles, and set it on the counter-top beside my coffee cup, where I could study the handwriting and the words.
THAT AFTERNOON I put on a summer sport coat over my T-shirt and drove half an hour west to visit my mother. She was living then in one of the leafier suburbs, not far from where I had grown up, in a place called Apple Meadow. People cooked her meals and cleaned her room, and there was a garden with white metal chairs set around a fountain, and manicured lawns, and an activity room with a television and a card table. Doctors, nurses, physical therapists, cleaning women, receptionists-everyone I’d ever spoken with at Apple Meadow seemed competent and caring, and you couldn’t find a surface with dust on it if you were paid to, and there was really no other place my mother could have been as happy and safe, or treated as well. But every time I drove up to the guardhouse and gave my name I felt like some kind of traitor, a good enough son wearing a thin suit of selfishness.
She was sitting in an armchair in the sunny visitors’ room, gold and diamond earrings my father had given her sparkling at the sides of her face, hands resting in her lap. She might have been waiting for me or she might not have been. At sixty-seven, she was the youngest person there. Probably the healthiest, too, except for the fact that her mind-which had been a wonderful mind-had started to travel down roads that were closed off to most other minds. She recognized me when I came through the door, though; her neatly trimmed eyebrows lifted a quarter of an inch and she flashed her small, pretty smile, one corner of one top front tooth chipped away from when she had tried to bite the flip top off a can of Pepsi. “Ellory!” she said, holding out her arms. “Doctor Entwhistle!”
A year before, just about the time when everything had changed for me, she had started calling me by my brother’s name. She had also started talking to me as though I were a physician-which is what she had been, which is what I’d been expected to be. It was as if she somehow understood that my happy enough little world had just been blown up, and her response to that was to make me into someone else, as if that might let me slip free of the pain. After trying various other strategies, I had finally decided to play along. As a pretend-doctor, I could at least accompany her a short way down some of the roads she traveled. I could do a better job of bringing that light to her face when I walked into the visitors’ room. Somehow, by some interior mechanism I did not understand, my being a doctor partly rebuilt the connection that had been broken by her illness. I could sit again in a skewed version of the warmth and generosity I’d grown up with, and once you’ve had that kind of affection in your life, you are marked by it forever. What my mother had given me, given us, was exactly what Gerard had not been given enough of as a boy. He and I talked about that sometimes.
That day, Mum and I walked the neat grounds of Apple Meadow, around and around, back and forth. It was the new pattern: sometimes she held my arm and was quiet. Other times she said things like this: “It’s not a question of money, Ellory. Money just represents something else, an agreement to value one thing over another. Only children don’t have this value put on them because children have one foot in the ocean and pay no attention. It terrifies us, this ocean. But the fear of drowning is absurd. We already are drowned.”
“Exactly,” I’d say, and we’d stroll along like intellectuals on holiday in Baden-Baden.
And then, at some point after it had circled and circled and spun off in a series of nonsensical eddies, the conversation would drift back to her old world, the world of medicine, the world of being paid to care about other people’s pain and fear. It was very strange because, in that world, whole sectors of my mother’s memory and thought processes had been left undamaged, and it always sent a happy jolt through me when the conversation went there and we were actually almost making sense again.
“How is your practice?” she would ask, with so much pride in her voice that it made me wish I’d stayed in med school. “What interesting cases have you seen recently, Doctor Entwhistle?”
Sometimes, before visiting her, I’d go on Gerard’s computer and spend an hour researching exotic illnesses. One Saturday we’d talked at length about intestinal parasites in children, and the strange variety of symptoms they could cause. The Ebola virus fascinated her, and had led us to leeching and leukemia. Her mind was a library in which certain floors and sections of stacks had no electricity, and others were still well lighted enough for reading.
“I have a patient with cystic fibrosis now,” I told her on that day, because I had not been able to stop hearing Janet’s voice as she lay in the darkness.
“Horrible,” my mother said. “A ghastly disease. A torturer. A killer of children.”
“Young adults now, mostly,” I said. “They’ve made some advances.”
“You’re more in touch with these things than I am.”
“She’s twenty-seven, my patient. Almost the statistical mean age of death now.”
“Ah,” my mother said, sounding surprised. She spent a little while searching around in her interior darkness. “Pseudomonas bacterium?”
“Yes.”
“Constant coughing? Digestive troubles?”
“Pancreatic enzymes,” I said, and with that, I came to the end of what I knew.
“Horrible, horrible.”
We walked another few paces. “What causes it, Mum?”
She turned her stone-blue eyes up at me. “What causes it? You must have slept through the lecture that day, Ellory. Are you asking seriously?”
I nodded.
“A gene. A defective gene.”
“I know that,” I said, and gave a little fake chuckle. “But at the cellular level. What is the exact… what is going on?”
“Salt and water don’t pass between the cells easily enough, the mucus is thick, the skin is salty, haven’t you noticed? It’s one tiny mistake. A glitch.”
“There are new drugs being developed,” I ad-libbed. “There’s talk of a cure in the not-too-distant future. I wanted to ask you what you’d recommend in the way of treatment.”
“Not my area of expertise.” She swung her hands out, palms up, her ring finger wobbling slightly as I had seen it do a thousand times. “But they have identified the gene, as you know.”
“Yes.”
“Done some work with new antibiotics.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What I would suggest is that you go and speak with Doctor… at the Beth Israel. With Doctor… Doctor…”
I could feel the change sweeping through her. It was as if she’d managed to escape from a great heavy demon and run a few steps back toward sanity, and then the demon had caught her from behind, wrapped itself around her, and was now in the process of dragging her back into the darkness. Her muscles stiffened. Her face puckered, turning up the fine light hair on her cheeks. Four, five, six times she tried for the doctor’s name: “You really must consult with Doctor… Doctor… Ellory, it’s Doctor…” At last she surrendered and let herself be dragged back. When she spoke again we were miles apart. “Gwendolyn Mitchell and her brood of six went to the minister’s house for Sunday dinner, you know, and once the squash was served you couldn’t find a place to sit at the table, can you imagine?”
There was a connection somewhere, I knew that. I had some understanding of the ways her mind worked now. Maybe one of the Mitchells had suffered from cystic fibrosis. Maybe the doctor’s name at Beth Israel was Mitchell or his wife or assistant was Gwendolyn. Sometimes the word my mother was searching for would pop up again an hour later, in the midst of another conversation, or as we were saying good-bye, or when I spoke with her on the phone in the middle of the week.
“Nothing is harder to imagine, Mum,” I said.
“They weren’t always that way, the Mitchells.”
“No.”
“In fact, we liked them. Out of pity, I sometimes thought, but we liked them.”
“Never a good motivation,” I said.
I turned her back toward the main building and when we were inside I spent a little time with her in front of the communal TV, watching football-her latest passion. When I was ready to say good-bye she kissed me and held me in her strong arms as if she were still living in the two-hundred-year-old blue saltbox in Concord, and my father was still alive, beside her, smiling and puffing on his pipe, and my brother Ellory was still a hell-raiser who had not yet shocked the neighborhood by turning Catholic and becoming a monk, and my sister Lizbeth was just a pretty teenager who had not yet made her life into a constant search for drugs and the money to buy drugs. For those few seconds my mother squeezed the guilt and sorrow out of me and we traveled back to a place where we had been happy, unusually happy, unscarred, suburban, American, bubbling over with health and brains and energy, convinced the future would be kind and good. Our embrace was a kind of code. “I’m still me,” she was signaling. And I was answering, “I know. I know.”
But I left Apple Meadow wondering how many years she would live like that, and what it felt like inside, and whether it really made any difference at all to her if I visited or stayed away.
YOU CALLED AT a key moment,” I told Gerard on Monday morning, when he asked why I hadn’t answered the phone to tell him about my date with Janet at Diem Bo.
“There are three key moments.”
“It was the second.”
“That’s it? No details?”
“Have I ever provided details about my love life?”
“Not in a year or more, no. I was only giving you the opportunity to enjoy the experience a second time by telling the story to your closest friend.”
“Thanks. I’ll pass.”
“I’m hurt.”
“We went to Diem Bo for supper. How’s that?”
“What did you have?”
“Scallops and sea bass and duck.”
“La frutta di mare. Good. And where did you go afterwards?”
“For a swim.”
“Skinny-dip?”
“Fully clothed.”
“Alright, stop there,” he said. “For an imagination like mine, that’s enough. The possibilities from that point are endless.”
“In the Charles River,” I said.
“No no, don’t spoil it, Colonel. Let the imagination run free. Let it run wild! The Charles’s fetid waters lapping against her tight bodice. You in your Sunday best, your trousers wet and your manhood surging against the material. No, leave me to my imaginings. Please.”
I left him to his imaginings.
We had finished framing the professor’s addition and were involved in the monotonous nailing of half-inch plywood onto the second-floor walls. The professor’s name was Jacqueline Levarkian and she taught theoretical physics at Harvard. She was an attractive and obviously brilliant single woman, and from the day we’d started working there, in midsummer, Gerard had been trying various stunts to get her to pay attention to him. Once, when he knew she was home, he pretended to slip off the staging and dangled there, holding on with one hand and screaming out over the sedate Cambridge neighborhood for me to rescue him, pedaling his legs and gesticulating wildly with his free hand, three feet above the ground, like a circus clown. Two or three times during the workday he’d flip his thirty-two-ounce hammer into the air, end-over-end, three full revolutions, catch it expertly by its blue handle, and pretend to be making up physics formulas to describe the hammer’s movement (“You take the cosign of s, where s represents the centrifugal force of the atomic weight of steel…”). He’d sing snatches from operas he liked. He’d bring books of poetry-Latin, Russian, Italian, Greek-to the work site to impress her. Once, when Jacqueline had an afternoon off, she brought us out homemade oatmeal cookies and iced tea and Gerard engaged her in a complicated discussion of something called string theory, then kissed her hand afterwards.
I knew this about my friend: early in his life he had not been given some quality of motherly or fatherly attention that says: I see you. You are fine as you are, flaws and all. You are accepted, you are beloved. And ever since then he had tried to fill up that empty place by getting attention, especially from women. Which had not made marriage an easy thing for him. Or for his former wife. With me, he talked too much and joked too much and laughed too loudly and called at all hours. But he could work like a pair of oxes, and I had never seen him be mean, and when Giselle died, he made sure I never sank below a certain level of rock-bottom misery and I did not expect I would ever forget that.
I picked up a sheet of plywood, leaned it sideways against my hip and shoulder and the side of my head, and then passed it up to him on the staging.
“Huddy! Queek!” he screamed as I was climbing the ladder. “Eeet eez sleeping from my grahsp!”
When we had worked it into place and were driving the galvanized eightpenny nails at six-inch intervals, I asked him if he knew anything about cystic fibrosis.
“Jerry’s kids,” he said, going into a terrible imitation of Jerry Lewis’s honking, bighearted goofiness.
“That’s muscular dystrophy. I’m asking about cystic fibrosis. CF.”
“All the alphabet diseases are awful, Colonel, I know that much. AIDS, ALS, MS, Ph.D.”
“Is this something we want to be joking about?”
“If it is what I think it is, then one of the only things we can do is joke about it, Colonel. You should understand that.”
“Right. The woman I went out with on Friday night has CF.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. You need a governor on your mouth, though, sometimes.”
Governor on your mouth. Amazing how things like that just slip out. Gerard, naturally, would not let it go.
“Actually, if I had incarnated into a woman’s body, I wouldn’t mind the governor on my mouth. Our governor is one cute governor compared to, say, the governor of New Mexico…” and so on until I finally told him to stop, twice, and he did.
When we finished the nailing and were putting our tools away, I asked him if I could come over and do a little research on his computer, and I did that, then went home and painted for a while on a fresh canvas. But the work was timid work, uninspired, unsurprising, no good. As if they were marching on a parade ground behind my eyes, I could feel whole battalions of jealous soldiers in new uniforms. And I could hear a lying old self trying to convince me that Janet was a one-night type of woman. Skate on, skate on, the voice said. Too much trouble. Skate on. I gave up on the painting, cleaned the brushes, turned the easel around so I wouldn’t have to look at what I had done. After thinking about it for another little while I picked up the phone and called Janet to ask her out again, and we didn’t talk about the governor, or the alphabet diseases, or any kind of subject like that.