“He doesn’t need to do that; he’s the best writer they’ve got. If we’d stayed, we might have learned to write.”
“A dripping success like the rest.” Eve lifted the remote and began leafing through the channels.
“Are they going to show your assault again at ten?” I asked her.
“I’m afraid it’s the only news they’ve got, unless there’s been a solution in Bosnia.” She stopped at a black-and-white screen: the ocean, a frigate in a gray studio gale. Errol Flynn was in trouble on the high seas. “Jesus,” Eve said, “look. A real movie about real work.”
“I’m not sure.”
“It’s a real ship in real jeopardy, storm tossed. Every man on that vessel is thinking about his god.”
“That vessel is five feet long, being tossed by a wave machine in a studio pool.”
The waitress came and set our drinks on the table; there was now a city of glasses. I touched Eve’s glass and tossed mine back and she matched me, biting on the lime in the wake.
On the screen a man climbed in the rigging. Eve was getting loud: “The man holds a knife in his teeth while he risks death high above the deck.” Eve was loud; several heads turned. “His fucking knife in his teeth.”
I’d seen this; she wouldn’t stop until there was trouble. She’d make a mess and end up crying and I’d hold her until she was certain I was miserable, my shirtfront wet, wrecked from her crying; we’d get m her car and there would be some kissing until she was absolutely certain that I was more miserable than she was, and then she’d get straight, sit up, be brave, and we’d part, promising to call. It was a friendship; it was that thing, the postcoital friendship, always hard to balance. We’d been lovers for three months two years ago. I had been in the process of getting married at the time, and it all had been a dangerous game. I mean, Eve knew I wasn’t going to marry her. She came to the wedding and glowed there,
wearing the occasion on her chest like a medal. I’ve known her for a long time and she never stood as tall as she did that day, her chin a lesson for the congregation and an inside joke for our office friends. She immediately started going with Christopher, also a joke, two careerists, doomed from the get-go. Now we did this: she called, we met, I took my medicine. The drinks had registered in me a little, but I was pretty sure I wanted it over now.
Errol Flynn was back on deck, his face wet, hurrying to organize the men on the ship, and I reached across Eve and took the remote and changed the channels until Arvell Larsen, the weather guy, popped up. She turned her head with great care toward me and said, “I wasn’t going to make a scene. I was just happy to finally see a man with a knife in his mouth climbing the rigging. It’s been a while.” She lifted her glass and it seemed to light her face there; her clear, handsome face was compelling. She had a kind of hard perfection wonderful on television. People who just met her always looked twice in the first minute. “Can you stay? We could order some food. You like the quesadilla, right?”
I looked at her. I like to look at people; I like the charged moments and Eve knew it, accused me of being addicted to them and thereby manipulative, coy, fake, an asshole. We had eye contact there, and anybody can say what they want to say, but eye contact is it, the beginning, middle, and end. It is better and worse, stronger than fondling in a hallway, stealing a kiss, better than any touch, and I held the look, feeling it work in me, glide, and then I reset myself and opened my mouth.
“You better not,” she said. “Not that our gal Debbie has assumed an interest in cooking or learned to cook or even how to gather and prepare half a meal, but it will be dinnertime soon, and where is the new husband? Shall we picture her there in your bright new kitchen, standing at the ready as if
to open the fridge: What is that worried look on her face? I’m being such a bitch here. Is she concerned about her mate or…Fuck it, Matt. This is just the way I talk. I like Debbie. You can’t stay to eat. And me, what do I want to do, eat bar food with some man? Please, forget I said anything.”
Our table already looked like the party was over—seven glasses, three bottles, two napkins, assorted silverware splayed around the ashtray, the plastic bib holding the drink specials on one side and the appetizers on the other. I began to line up the silverware. It had been an old game of ours to remove the card with the appetizer specials on it, fold it inside out and write notes, sayings, mine always being, “A thirsty man has nothing for tears.” Now I just lined it up with the rest of the gear; I was lining things up. The late sun had dropped to the roadway and shot three powerhouse beams through the room, making the whole place only brown and gold, a science fiction scene, too bright, dangerous, throwing the shadows of the pool players against the far wall like storm clouds for a beat, and then a moment later as I finished my pathetic organizing of our tabletop, it all broke, the square girders of light dissipating into the bogus brown bar light, and we both looked up at our television for a moment, a woman identical to Eve with a microphone in front of an apartment building in New York. We couldn’t hear what she was saying.
I took a drink of the Red Stripe. “I like the bottles as much as the beer,” I said.
Eve leveled her look at me. “That’s the way it is.”
“The worst beer bottle?” I asked.
“Michelob,” she said without hesitating. “Stupid. Designed for nothing. Looks like it should be full of children’s shampoo.”
I smiled. “You’re sharp,” I said.
“Don’t,” Eve said, pointing the television remote at my
chest, “you patronize me. You can leave anytime you want, but do not sit there and try to kiss my ass.”
There was a cheer from the corner and the tall guy in a blue pinstripe shirt stood and raised his arms in a victory salute. Eve went on, “But this isn’t a good idea, is it? Idle chatter. We were smart and good at it once, but it was because it led somewhere. We’d meet and fence and once you saw how bright I was again we’d go to bed. Now it is what it is: idle chatter.” We watched the tall guy high-five his buddies, and Eve pointed. “There you are now. You had a couple of shirts like that; it’s a good shirt for you, so blue, so noncommital.”
Now I was ready to get out. The beer was good and I always liked the rush of being with Eve, being seen with her, but I wanted to leave, get back to my life. Eve pointed the remote at the tall young man, and I saw the channel change over there.
“Oh my God,” Eve whispered.
“What did you do?” I asked her.
There was an uproar from his mates. One cried out, “What’d you do, Ted!” and Ted turned and opened his arms before them—
I’ll take care of this
—and reached up to the elevated screen and put it back on the game. He turned and pointed at the guy who had complained, said something, and they all laughed.
“When you’d come to work in those shirts, I couldn’t wait for you to take your jacket off, come by my desk.” Eve wasn’t looking at me. “They have a nice upper yoke, well made, and the cotton is satisfying to iron. The first time I saw that shirt, I knew you’d put it on the back of the rocker in my bedroom.”
“I remember that chair.”
“Don’t remember it,” she said. Again she touched the remote and we heard the group in the corner complain. Ted stood and reached up for the controls. He looked at something standing there in the corner of the dark brown room. Eve let him right the set and sit down before she did it again. Now
several loud curses sounded, and Ted, of course, stood and tried to fix the problem. “Don’t remember my furniture.” The channels in the corner were spinning in a blur. “My furniture is not your concern, thank you, mister.”
Then there was tumult in the corner, one guy yelling out “What!” and also standing. “This is not a good idea!” he called to the room in general.
Eve looked at me. There were no tears there, and no gloating. “You think things happen and then they get to be good ideas later? Is that what we did? Dive in and then hope it was something even workable?” She stopped their television at a car commercial, some sleek vehicle on a winding wet country lane, an unreal place.
I told her the truth: “I wouldn’t know an idea, Eve, let alone a good one. I wanted to sleep with you—anyone in this room would. Face it, you’re a prize. You don’t get to win. You get to be the prize.” I touched her face, the skin there, knowing I could.
She stood up. It was an amazing thing, her standing next to me, so beautiful, her body in a green dress, her posture impeccable in the lost. light. She pointed the remote at Ted’s television now and held it like the beam that held the entire room hostage, and I felt it, like some cord that when it snapped would rock us all, and so I simply sat and let all my stupidity gather. Behind me in the big space, the pool balls nickered.
The young man Ted looked over at us, turned, a handsome figure in the dim light. He moved toward us with a kind of bounce in his step, a young guy in a pin-striped shirt, and he was angry, the look on his face was exactly
What the hell?
I’d already made up my mind that if there was a fight I would fight, and I knew what I would say afterward in the short term and the long term, and I was gladdened to be wrong, sitting there so wrong, waiting for this fine young man. Where had he been? I’d been waiting to meet this guy for a long time.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is merely coincidental, except for the restaurant I call the Wild Chicken, which was a real place actually called the Blue Bird, a drive-in fast-food joint 1 always drove past on my way to Debbie Delucca’s house. 1 always liked the Blue Bird, all the lights on late at night, because I knew that I was going to get a cheeseburger and a vanilla shake, so many of which I enjoyed with Debbie Delucca herself, or alone if I was driving back late from her house wrecked from all the couch time with her. The couch time I put in this book was real, too, as was the couch itself, a kind of overstuffed deal with Debbie’s mother’s big red and blue afghan on the back, a blanket that wanted to get caught in the gears and dragged into the evening’s activities quietly and inextricably, a beautiful bold coverlet with a repeated pattern of red geese against a blue sky. Of course, the Blue Bird, which I have called the Wild Chicken, and where I stood so many midnights under the fluorescent lights picking red and blue threads out; of my hair waiting for a cheeseburger and a vanilla shake, is now a Custom Tile Outlet, a place you can go if you want your fireplace to look like the one in any Hilton.
I also should add here that Debbie’s house is real, based on her real house, a green-sided thing on the corner of Concord and Eighth South that had a long shallow porch where I stood
so many nights that year whispering with Debbie, giving Mrs. Eisenhour across the street a little show, I guess, as we would stand some nights for an hour saying good-bye and I
love you
and
leant believe I’ve met someone like you
and
That was dreamy in there on the couch, I love you so much
and other direct dialogue which I’ve used in the text absolutely verbatim, probably the easiest thing of all the things in this book to write because everything we said is alive within my head after all these years, things actually said on the chilly fall nights there on Concord as we twisted closer, so lost some nights that we’d wipe our moist noses on each other’s necks under the huge munificent blessing of the ancient poplar tree in her front yard, a real tree that held up the sky for a half a mile in every direction, a giant that dumped its leaves in unending ten-ton squadrons that fall like some kind of perfect setting for us, a backdrop, a movie; if it could give up its ten million golden secrets, a blizzard of leaves, then we could be in love, a tree as gone as the house in which Debbie Delucca lived, under the blades for the interstate years ago, a tree we’ll never any of us see again.
No coincidence is going to bring that tree back, nor Debbie Delucca, who was my close associate all those years, the young person with whom I invented modern love, love as we know it. Love which so many people dabble in today, but do not study or understand or allow to course through their veins like some necessary thing. We were the last people to use love right. She’s now Debbie Delucca Peterson somewhere in St. Clare, where she does who knows what. I can’t imagine, though I’ve tried. And what am I going to do, go into the ShopMart down there and run into her at the little lunch counter they’ve got over by the children’s department as she sits quietly sipping some chicken noodle soup and reading this very book and nodding at how accurate every word is—the things she said, the things 1 said in return? And I’d sit
down beside her and order a vanilla shake, not even wanting their fake version of one of the world’s great treats, not even real ice cream, nor real vanilla, but wanting to say the words the way I did so many nights under the bright lights of the Blue Bird Cafe,
vanilla shake,
to see if she might turn to see who’s talking like this, looking up from a book that I’m sorry now I even wrote, really sorry, because I see it for the first time: you can’t get anything back. No coincidence at some lunch counter and twenty minutes of conversation with a girl you once knew, some woman sitting there, and you know the exact location of every mole on her body, is going to make one thing in this real world different. If you want the coincidence where some character based on me gets the amazing girl back and has his heart start again after so many years, you’re going to have to look in a book.
II
THE ORDINARY SON
THE STORY OF MY FAMOUS
family is a story of genius and its consequences, I suppose, and I am uniquely and particularly suited to tell the story since genius avoided me—and I it—and I remain an ordinary man, if there is such a thing, calm in all weathers, aware of event, but uninterested and generally incapable of deciphering implication. As my genius brother Garrett used to say, “Reed, you’re not screwed too tight like the rest of us, but you’re still screwed.” Now, there’s a definition of the common man you can trust, and further, you can trust me. There’s no irony in that or deep inner meaning or Freudian slips, any kind of slips really, simply what it says. My mother told me many times I have a good heart, and of course, she was a genius, and that heart should help with this story, but a heart, as she said so often, good as it may be, is always trouble.