Matt
I knew I was acting silly, but there were moments every day when I’d think about Lucy and get a big smile on my face. She and I saw each other three or four times a week, and I often stayed over at her apartment. Our sex life was better than anything I had ever dreamed of, though it annoyed me that she usually smoked a joint before we made love. She said she was like Annie Hall, marijuana made her relax. She tried to get me to try some, but that was a line I didn’t want to cross. I was too straight, too much a cop. I never asked where she bought the stuff and didn’t want to know. I figured if that was my only complaint, I had none at all.
Every Sunday without fail, I called my mother, but it wasn’t until after Labor Day that I felt confident enough to mention Lucy.
“So,” Mom said, “when will I get to meet her?”
“Sometime soon I hope. We could come to Butler for a long weekend. Better yet, why don’t you come up here? It’s been awhile. Let me buy you a plane ticket for your birthday.” She was turning fifty-four in October.
She said that sounded wonderful. I liked hearing the excitement in her voice, as I knew she liked hearing it in mine. She wouldn’t come right out and say it, but most of her friends had become grandparents and she was feeling left out.
One afternoon on the job, I saw a skinny black kid snatch an old woman’s purse and knock her down. Several people on the sidewalk rushed to the woman’s side, and I took off after the kid. I had nearly lost sight of him as he ran through Chinatown when he tripped on a dolly stacked with orange crates and dropped the purse. I yelled for the truck driver pushing the dolly to grab him, but the trucker only managed to tear off the kid’s T-shirt. The kid was limping as he took off again. I thought I was in pretty good shape, but my lungs were heaving and my leg muscles burned. I made one last burst and caught the boy, but he was sweaty and kept slipping out of my grip. I finally got my left arm wrapped around his neck.
“Hold still,” I said.
“Get off me, motherfucker!”
I tightened my grip on his neck. “Just calm down. I’m gonna cuff you.”
“Stop choking me, you fucking pig.”
He kept kicking and flailing, and his elbow struck my cheek. I saw stars but didn’t let go. Hooking the fingers of my right hand under the kid’s belt, I lifted him off his feet and slammed him down on the sidewalk. There was a loud crack, and the boy screamed. I stood over him for a second then staggered away a few steps, put my hands on my knees, and vomited. I couldn’t say if I was sick from all the running or the sight of the jagged bone protruding from the boy’s arm.
The next day, several black community leaders went down to City Hall decrying police brutality, hoping to get their pictures in the newspapers. The department withheld my name from the press. The boy, who was fourteen years old, had been arrested several times before. Two officers from internal investigations interviewed me and told me not to worry. They said there were several witnesses to back up my story, and the old woman had broken her hip when the kid knocked her down. Despite these assurances, the incident shook me up. I remembered throwing the boy to the ground and
wanting
to hurt him. I knew there was a split second when I could have stopped myself and didn’t. Lucy suggested I visit him in the hospital, but that was taboo, almost an admission of guilt.
A week went by. No one had filed a formal complaint with the department, but I was still worried about the repercussions. I didn’t think I would lose my job, but the incident could cost me a spot on Captain Antonucci’s task force. This wasn’t something I could discuss with Lucy or anyone else. I didn’t sleep well at night.
One afternoon I was standing on the corner of Tremont and Boylston, listening to a homeless man tell me about the fortune he’d lost in the rare coin business, when Sergeant Barker pulled up in a squad car.
“Hey, boyo,” he said. He got out of the car, and the homeless man shuffled off. “Can you believe that?” Barker pointed at a billboard advertising
The
Spy
Who
Loved
Me
. “How could they pick a fag like Roger Moore to replace Sean Connery? You telling me that’s the best actor they could come up with? Sean Connery is a legend. Did you see
The
Man
Who
Would
Be
King
? Greatest fuckin’ movie ever made.”
“I’ll second that,” I said. Sean Connery and Michael Caine, a Rudyard Kipling story with John Huston directing. How could it not be great? I’d seen it three times and had been telling Lucy about it recently. I was hoping it would come on TV so we could watch it together.
We both loved to go to the movies but rarely agreed on what to see. I liked movies, she liked films. Movies were entertainment, stories that made you laugh or cry and kept you on the edge of your seat. Films had meanings and subtitles, slow, tortuous stories with bleak endings or no ending at all. Films were supposed to make you think, but they usually put me to sleep. We settled on a compromise, alternating between her choice and mine. A few weeks ago she dragged me to a double feature of
Persona
and
Cries
and
Whispers
. On the drive back to her place, I asked her if she’d noticed the bowl of free razor blades in the lobby for people who wanted to go home and slit their wrists. It took her a second to realize I was joking. We ended up having an argument, then laughed about it later.
I wanted nothing more than to make Lucy happy. For her part, she rarely showed that edge Jill had told me about. If she was hiding it, I didn’t care. We treated each other with uncommon tenderness. Never bickered or took a stubborn stand over some petty principle or demand, as if we were afraid one ugly fight would tear us apart. It wasn’t something we talked about. I didn’t spend much time thinking about it either. We’d been together for two and a half months. The more trust and goodwill we built up in happy times, the better off we’d be when we hit the inevitable rough patch.
Barker jerked a thumb at the squad car. “Hop in, boyo. We have to run.”
“What’s up, Sarge?”
“Captain wants to see you.”
“Now?” My mouth suddenly felt dry. “Is this about that kid whose arm I broke?”
He shrugged. “No idea. But you don’t have to worry about that. ’Nucci won’t hang you out to dry over that bullshit.”
Not unless someone from City Hall was leaning on him. Captain Antonucci must have seen the concern in my face as I took a chair across from his desk.
“Listen, Drobyshev, that thing with the kid? The scumbag purse-snatcher?” His face was grim. “You don’t have to worry about it affecting that other thing we talked about. I got your back all the way.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But look, that’s not why I called you in here.” He started playing with a hockey puck on his desk, rolling it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. “I got a call from your Aunt Sally a little while ago. Your mother…I’m sorry, I’m afraid she passed away.”
I stared at the captain blankly. No words came into my head.
“She was at work. They said she just put her head down on the desk like she was taking a nap, and the next thing anyone knew, she was gone. She didn’t suffer.”
Blood pooled in my arms and legs, anchoring me to the chair. The captain kept talking, but I didn’t hear what he said. He came around the desk and patted my shoulder. Then he walked me to an empty office with a couch and a desk and a telephone. Someone brought me a cold soda. I asked if I could be alone.
I sat on the couch and closed my eyes and thought about the last time I’d seen my mother. It was early April, a beautiful spring weekend. I helped her work in the yard and repaired the trellis for her roses. My last morning home I woke to the smell of bacon. When I came downstairs, I heard her singing a Fleetwood Mac song. She had a lovely voice. She was the only parent I knew who listened to pop music. My friends used to call her Mrs. D and liked to come to the house and hang out. I walked into the kitchen and said good morning, and she poured me a cup of coffee. She was making my favorite omelet with cheddar cheese, chopped onions, and red peppers. When the food was ready, Mom sat down, and we ate and talked and laughed as we always did. An ordinary morning together. I couldn’t believe there would never be another. Surely if I conjured up enough details, piling them up like talismans, I’d go home and find that nothing had changed.
I went to the desk and called Aunt Sally, who wasn’t actually my aunt but my mother’s best friend. She sobbed the moment she heard my voice. I wanted to sob too, but I sat there holding the phone, saying nothing. Sally said they’d reached my uncle Joe in the mine, and he was going to help arrange things. She asked if there was anything special I wanted done, and I said I couldn’t think of anything. I told her I’d be home as soon as possible.
“You call the minute you get here, honey,” she said. “I don’t care what time it is. And if you don’t…if you feel strange being in that house all alone, you come stay with us.”
I phoned Lucy next.
“Oh my god, Matt!” she said. “That’s horrific. I’m so sorry. Where are you now?”
“Still at the station. I need to go back to my apartment and pack some clothes. I’m not sure whether I should fly or drive.”
“How long does it take to drive?”
“Eleven, twelve hours. I guess there isn’t any rush.”
“You don’t want to be on the road alone at a time like this. I’ll go with you. I’ll leave work right now.”
As soon as she said it, I knew I didn’t want her to come. I had no idea how I was going to act, whether I was going to break down or fly into a rage or plod through the whole thing like a zombie. Probably a little of each and none of it pretty. Besides, I didn’t want Lucy’s only memory of my mother to be a corpse lying in a coffin. It would be better if Lucy didn’t come at all. But how could I tell her that? Wasn’t this a time when I was supposed to need her most?
“Matt?”
“Sure, okay.”
“Unless you’d rather be by yourself.”
“No, no, I
want
you to come. I’m sorry. This is all…”
“I can’t even imagine what you’re going through. Listen, why don’t we take my car so we’ll have more room? I’ll come to your place and pick you up. I’ll drive. We’ll talk—or not. Maybe you can get some sleep. Whatever you want.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“See you soon.”
“Lucy?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
She took a deep breath. “Oh, Matt.”
I pushed the button down on the phone. I still had the receiver in my hand, and I wanted to smash it down on the desk. I’d just taken the cheapest of cheap shots, the dead mother pity plea. Poor little orphan boy begging for love. I had no idea I could stoop so low.
Lucy
Matt and I barely spoke on the long drive from Boston to Butler, no radio, just the dull whir of the highway, me trying not to chain smoke, trying not to feel like he wished I hadn’t come. Now and again he’d reach over and touch me and give me an almost-smile. We got to his house around two in the morning and went to sleep in the double bed in the guest bedroom. In the middle of the night, I felt him spoon against me, and I pretended not to wake up as I scissored my legs and he slipped inside me, so gentle and dreamlike I wondered if he was even awake himself.
We were up early, and Matt started making phone calls, talking to relatives and the undertaker; then we went to the funeral home with his uncle Joe to pick out a casket. The “viewing,” as it was called, began Friday evening and continued all weekend, three hours in the afternoon and three more in the evening, a steady stream of mourners. Matt never cried or wavered in his kindness, giving comfort to those whose grief seemed even greater than his own. Aunt Sally had placed several framed photographs of Matt’s mother around the funeral home. She had a shy smile with a little V between her front teeth, the same round face as Matt, the same deep-set eyes—a face that seemed to have no connection with the body that lay in the coffin.
Matt’s best friend, Dan Roble, told me Mrs. D’s house was always the most popular place for their crew to hang out. He said he’d stop by just to talk sometimes, even when Matt wasn’t home. Dan didn’t have many stories about their high school escapades. He said he and Matt were both too shy to do much dating, too busy working part-time jobs to get into trouble.
When we weren’t at the funeral home, people congregated at Aunt Sally’s house where women brought endless supplies of food—pirogi, sausages, macaroni, dumplings, potato salad. Matt called these women The Ladies. They treated me like I belonged, their affection seemingly free of cattiness and suspicion, no snide remarks or probing questions, their goodwill so unconstrained I felt like I had wandered onto the set of an old television show.
The funeral service Monday morning lasted for an hour and a half, followed by the slow ride to the cemetery, the procession of cars stretching for several blocks, then another service at the graveside where they lowered the coffin. I hung back while Matt threw the first shovel of dirt, then others did the same. Matt wanted to stay and finish the job, but his uncle Joe talked him out of it.
We gathered at a restaurant where they’d set up a big buffet. I was sitting with Mr. Karski, who was Aunt Sally’s father and had worked in the mines with Matt’s grandfather. He started telling me stories about “the old country,” which people talked about like a distant matriarch, the formidable babushka you missed terribly and were just as happy never to see again.
“Half my friends said they were Polish, the other half Russian,” Mr. Karski said. “The border was always moving. We used to joke about it. Go to bed in one country and wake up the next morning in the other.”
Aunt Sally, who was short and wide as a beanbag chair, came over and gave me a hug. “Don’t believe a word he says, Lucy. The man could talk Satan into buying a crucifix.”
“What would be wrong with
that
?” Mr. Karski said.
Sally saw the restaurant manager and hurried over to tell him something. This was clearly her show.
I said to Mr. Karski, “So you spoke both languages, Russian and Polish?”
“Oh sure, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian. A little Serb, a little English.” He grinned, proud that he had only a slight accent. Some of the elderly people at the funeral seemingly spoke no English at all. “The Tsar, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Romanov, decided I was Russian and drafted me into the Imperial Army. I lasted four months before I deserted. I spent the winter hiding in a farmer’s barn. Never spoke to the man or looked him in the eye, but he left me a crust of bread or bowl of something every day, enough to get by. I always wished I knew his name, so I could write him a letter and say thank you.”
He finished his whiskey, his plate of food untouched. He was tiny with a full head of white hair and a tic in his eye, which I first mistook for a wink. I asked if I could get him another whiskey.
“No, no, one is enough for me,” he said. “When an old man drinks, either he starts thinking he’s young again and makes a fool of himself, or remembers how old he is and ends up getting sad.”
I excused myself and went to get another glass of wine. One of The Ladies intercepted me and asked me to come meet her daughter, who had just arrived from out of town last night. The people of Butler, Pennsylvania, were probably as corrupt as people everywhere else, bigoted, backbiting, quietly committing the seven deadly sins—gluttony seemed to be the local favorite—but the way they accepted me with open arms put to shame the vain, judgmental world I’d grown up in.
Who
are
his
people?
my Virginia-bred grandfather used to say. I tried to imagine Matt coming home with me under similar circumstances, members of the country club making snotty inquiries about his peculiar last name, most of them dismissing him out of hand as soon as they learned he was a cop. Not that the people in New Canaan, Connecticut, had anything against the police, per se. My parents’ crowd was staunchly Republican and firm believers in law and order, but cops, to them, were simply part of the large contingent of worker bees who trundled in from the vast elsewhere, people who were paid to keep our town safe and clean and educated.
Drinking had begun in earnest. A man got out his violin, and a group of spongy middle-aged men gathered around him and began to sing a doleful Russian song. Then the fiddler picked up the tempo, and the men started to dance, squatting like Cossacks, falling and laughing and trying again. The children quickly joined in, spinning and sliding across the polished wooden floor in their good clothes, the women looking on with mock disapproval and oceans of love in their eyes, a celebration of what was lost and what remained.
Matt smiled at me from across the room. The Ladies liked to tell me he was a
catch
(the kind of man your mother would want you to marry if you had a normal mother), and I’d nod and say,
Yes, he is
, as if it were all but settled, nothing but this tragic circumstance preventing us from making the announcement of our impending nuptials. For the past four days, I had been trying to imagine a future with him. Matt had told me he loved me, and I was touched that he’d taken the chance, but there were quiet moments when I found myself sitting alone, wondering only how fast and far I could flee. Maybe this was exactly what Griffin felt with me, a sense that, whatever we had, it was not quite right, not quite enough.
The closer I grew with Matt, the more I seemed to talk about Griffin with my therapist. A few weeks ago, Carla said she wanted me to make a list comparing the two men and bring it to our next session. I thought it was a ridiculous exercise, but once I got started, it became intriguing. I took a yellow legal pad and made two columns:
Matt/Griffin, tall/short, plain/handsome, dark/fair, sweet/acerbic, working class/privileged, Butler County Community College/Princeton, frugal/generous, loyal/philandering, loves me/probably doesn’t.
The list went on and on.
I didn’t write it down, but nowhere was the difference between them more pronounced than the way they made love. Griffin was demanding and inventive and uninhibited. He laid claim to me, took me, and did whatever he wanted. He took other women too and never tried to deny it. He would tell me who it was if I asked, which I did sometimes, wanting not just a name but details—every lick and hole, the pornographic montage—until I felt utterly debased and aroused and we fucked like it was the last days of Pompeii. I had kept most of this from Carla, out of shame, I guess, or maybe I was afraid she’d find a way to make me stop. It was reprehensible behavior, especially for a woman who liked to think of herself as a feminist. The only excuse I can offer is that I found him captivating, like Patty Hearst and other victims who become attached to their kidnappers. On an intellectual level, I knew I shouldn’t let him treat me the way he did, just as I knew I shouldn’t love him (if, as Carla would say, it was even love at all), but Griffin, for all his considerable faults, took me places I had never been. Places I wanted to go back to again.
Matt was a gentle, diffident lover: patient, intent on pleasing me, his stamina heroic. He touched me as if I were something precious, something he was afraid he might break. At times he seemed to regard his own satisfaction as an afterthought. He never knew when I was faking, or perhaps he chose not to call me on it. I tried to nudge him into more aggressive, adventurous sex, a bit of fantasy and role-playing, which he did sometimes, but it made him uncomfortable. Yet, for all his solicitude and self-control, when Matt finally let go, he did so with complete abandon—grunting, snorting, roaring—no faking on his part. Matt
gave
himself to me, got lost in me and let himself be vulnerable, and when he was spent, he always said thank you. Then he would hold me or, more remarkably, let me hold him, content as any man could ever be. One night he said,
Forget the story
about
the
snake and the
apple. This is what got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden. God knew He couldn’t compete
. How, in the name of reason, could I not love a man like that? As if reason had anything to do with love.
“Matt is Steady Eddy,” I told Carla. “What you see is what you get. Griffin is always surprising me. He keeps me guessing. There’s something about his unpredictability that pulls me in.”
Carla shrugged.
“Is that wrong?” I said.
“This isn’t about right and wrong, Lucy. It’s about the kind of life you want.” She handed me the list. “You missed one important difference.”
“What?”
I guessed at one thing and another before she took the list back and wrote at the bottom:
here/gone
.
***
Matt and I were alone in his house the evening after the funeral. He started to go through his mother’s papers, trying to sort out what he should take back to Boston when we left the next morning. The files were neat and well organized (like mother, like son), notes on the documents written in a small, precise script. She had left everything to him in her will, no outstanding debts, the mortgage and car paid off. Matt picked up a black leather folder with a brass clasp, his mother’s insurance policies.
“Check this out and tell me what you think.” He handed me a policy.
It was a thick document with lots of fine print and legalese, but all you needed to know was on the first page.
“It’s for fifty thousand dollars,” I said.
“You’re sure?”
“That’s what it says.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “There’s two more here, one for fifteen thousand, another for forty.”
“That’s incredible.”
“I know. It’s way too much money. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“But that was her business, right? She knew what she was doing.”
“I guess. She worked for the agency for twenty-six years. I talked to her boss, Barry Ledyard, at the funeral home. He wrote the policies, but he never said anything about this.”
“That’s not the place to talk about money, Matt. It’s only seven-thirty. Why don’t you call him and ask?”
Matt seemed hesitant.
“I’m going to get a glass of white wine,” I said. “You want anything?”
“Wine sounds good.”
When I came back from the kitchen, he was on the phone. I heard him saying goodbye to Mr. Ledyard, thanking him for his help.
“It’s what we thought,” he said. “The policies have a total value of one hundred five thousand dollars. The money’s all tax-free. He said I should have a check in a few weeks.”
I handed him the glass of wine. “That’s wonderful. What an amazing gift.”
“Yeah, pretty fucking ironic, huh?” He spread his arms wide, wine sloshing onto the rug, and let out a self-mocking laugh. “Here I am, an orphan in Fat City.”
He ground the wine spot into the rug with his shoe. I led him to the couch, and he leaned his head on my shoulder, the wineglass still in his hand. I stroked his hair, hoping he would let go and cry.
“This is crazy,” he said. “First I meet you and fall in love. Then the captain calls me in and says he wants me to serve on some new task force.” I hadn’t heard about that before but didn’t interrupt. “Just to make sure things don’t get too routine, I chase down some kid and break his arm so bad he needs a plate and umpteen screws. Ten days later my mother drops dead. Now I find out I’ve inherited more money than I ever thought I’d have in my life.” I kept stroking his hair. “It all seems so fucking
random
.” He lifted his wineglass as if he were making a toast, his hand wrapped around the bowl. “Just life, I guess.”
The glass exploded in his hand.
“Matt!”
He rolled off the couch and stood up, looking at his hand as if it were a curiosity, some bloody urchin dredged up from the deep. A shard of glass protruded from his palm.
“I’m going to need stitches,” he said.
On the way to the hospital, he made me promise I would corroborate his story, saying that he stumbled and fell. In the emergency room, he joked with the doctor and nurses about being a klutz. The doctor said he was fortunate he hadn’t cut an artery; it took eleven stitches to close the wound.
I tried to talk to him about it when we got back to the house.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t explain what came over me.”
“It’s normal. You just needed to feel something.”
He gave me a contemptuous look. “Believe me, I’ve had way too many
feelings
already.”
“Matt, I’m sorry. I—”
“Forget it.”
“No, that was an idiotic thing for me to say.”
“
Forget
it, okay?”
I let it go. But part of me wanted to provoke him and have one of those fights we’d both been so careful to avoid, the kind where ugly thoughts get spoken aloud and you are knocked back by what you’ve heard and what you’ve said, unsure how much was true, both of you knowing that the fight was not simply inevitable, but necessary. I wanted to quarrel and get it over with and find out what we were really made of. But not now, not after all that Matt had been through. The next day we drove back to Boston and acted like the incident with the wineglass had never happened.