The Beginner's Goodbye (7 page)

“How about a game tomorrow?” I asked him.

“Pardon?”

“A game of racquetball! I’m turning into an old man here. All my joints are rusting.”

“Well, ah, but … I was calling to invite you to dinner,” he said.

“Dinner?”

“Yes, Sonya was saying we ought to have you over.”

Sonya must be his wife. I had never met his wife. I suppose he must have mentioned her from time to time, but we didn’t have that kind of friendship. We had a
racquetball
friendship. We’d gotten acquainted at the gym.

I said, “Over to … to your house, you mean?”

“Right.”

“Well, gosh, Nate, I don’t know. I don’t even know where you live!”

“I live in Bolton Hill,” he said.

“And also I just … It’s been really busy at work lately. You wouldn’t believe how busy. I barely have time for a sandwich, and then, when I do find time, there is so much extra food in the fridge, these—these—these casseroles and these … cheesecakes. It’s practically a full-time job just to g-g-get it all d-d-d—just to eat it!”

“I see,” he said.

“But thanks.”

“That’s okay.”

“Tell Sonya I appreciate the thought.”

“Okay.”

I wanted to revisit the racquetball idea, but after I’d made such a point of being busy I figured that would be a mistake. So I just told him goodbye.

Not half an hour later, the phone rang again. This time it was
TULL L
. I answered, but I was warier now. All I said was, “Hello?”

“Hi, Aaron, it’s Luke.”

“Hi, Luke.”

“I can understand why you might prefer not to go to Nate’s.”

“Excuse me?”

“He told me you’d turned down his invitation.”

I said, “You’re talking about Nate Weiss.”

“Why, yes.”

“You
know
Nate Weiss?”

“We met in the hospital waiting room, remember? When we both stopped by to visit.”

This had been happening a lot lately. I swear I had no recollection that either one of them had stopped by, let alone that they’d met each other. But I said, “Oh. Right.”

“He says he got the impression you’re not up yet for coming to dinner.”

“No, but racquetball …” I said. “I’m itching for a good game of racquetball.”

There was a pause. Then Luke said, “Unfortunately, I don’t know how to play racquetball.”

“Oh.”

“But I was thinking: if getting together with wives and such is too much to handle just now—”

“
Oh
, no.
Lord
, no,” I said briskly. “Doesn’t faze me in the least.”

Another pause. Then he said, “I was thinking you could come to the restaurant instead.”

He meant
his
restaurant, which was how we’d been introduced, back in the era of
The Beginner’s Book of Dining Out
. I said, “Well, that’s a good idea, Luke. Maybe sometime in the—”

“Just you and me and Nate; just us guys. No wives. We could have an early supper, and then you could head on home whatever time you felt like. How about it?”

I didn’t want to do that, either, but what could I say? It was nice of him to make the effort. It was nice of both of them. I doubted I would have done as much if I had been in their place. I was more the “Let’s move on” type. The “Maybe if I don’t mention your loss, you’ll forget it ever happened” type.

I kind of wished
they
were that type, to be honest.

But okay: might as well get this over with. I met them directly after work the next evening, a rainy, blowy Tuesday in mid-September. It had been pouring all day, and driving conditions were terrible. On top of that, I had trouble finding a parking space. By the time I walked into the restaurant (white linens, wide-planked floors, a certain worn-around-the-edges friendliness), Nate and Luke were already seated at a table. They made an unlikely pair. Nate looked very sleek and dark and professional in his black lawyer-suit, whereas Luke was one of those all-one-color, beige-hair-beige-skin types in shabby khakis, going a little soft around the middle. They seemed to be having no trouble finding things to talk about, though, if you judged by the way they’d set their heads together. I had the distinct impression that it was me they were talking about. How to deal with me, what topics would be safe to discuss with me. I’d barely pulled
my chair out before Nate asked, “What about this
weather
, hey?” in a sprightly tone I wasn’t familiar with. And Luke rode right over the tail of that with “You been following the Orioles?”

I felt compelled to answer in kind, in a louder voice than usual and with more verve. “You know, I
haven’t
as a matter of fact been following the Orioles lately,” I said, and then I wanted to take the words back, because I knew they’d be misinterpreted.

Sure enough: Nate said, “Well, of course you haven’t. You’ve had a lot more important things to think about.”

“No, I just meant—”

“Both of you should try the oysters!” Luke broke in. “We’re in the
R
months now!”

Luke was such a quiet man ordinarily that it was bizarre to see him so animated. Besides which, he clearly felt uneasy sitting idle in his own workplace. He kept glancing around at other tables, raising his eyebrows significantly at waiters, frowning over Nate’s head in the direction of the kitchen. “I personally recommend eating these raw,” he told me in a distracted way, “but if you prefer, you could order the, uh …,” and then he paused to listen to what a short man in a stained apron was whispering in his ear.

“… the Oysters Rockefeller,” Nate finished for him. “Those are great. They use this special slab bacon that comes from upstate New York.”

“You’ve eaten here before?” I asked.

“Yes, we came by last week,” he said, and then he gave a little grimace, which I couldn’t figure out for a moment. Was it because he had let it slip that he and Luke had met earlier, perhaps to cogitate over The Aaron Problem? No, on second thought it must have been the “we” that had embarrassed him, because next he
said, as if correcting himself, “I had thought after I met him that I’d like to try his food.”

So apparently the plan tonight was to avoid all mention of wives. Pretend neither one of them even possessed a wife. For now Luke, turning back to us as the aproned man left, said, “Sorry, the chef has run out of lamb chops, is all,” and I happened to know that he was married to the chef. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have said that Jane or Joan or whatever her name was had run out of lamb chops, and he might also have brought her out to introduce her. But these were not ordinary circumstances.

I became perverse. I do that, sometimes. I started mentioning wives right and left—each utterance of the word “wife” thudding onto our table like a stone. “Did your wife like the Oysters Rockefeller, too?” I asked Nate, and Nate shifted in his seat and said, “Oh, um … she doesn’t eat shellfish.”

“You know, I’ve never thought to wonder,” I said to Luke. “Did your wife become chef here before you married her, or after?”

“Er, before, actually,” Luke told me. “Say! We need to decide on the wine!” And he sat forward urgently and beckoned to a waiter.

But I relented, after that, and let the conversation drift into more or less normal channels. Nate turned out to be the food-for-food’s-sake type, going on at length about the breeding beds of oysters and the best source for heirloom pork. Luke, whom you’d expect to be deeply concerned with such things, didn’t seem all that interested and spent most of his time focusing on what everyone else in the place was eating, or not eating enough of, or looking dissatisfied with. And within a bearable length of time, we managed to get through the evening.

“We should do this again!” Nate said as we were parting, and Luke said, “Yes! Make a regular thing of it!”

Oh, or else not. But I nodded enthusiastically, and shook both their hands, and thanked Luke for the meal, which he had refused to let us pay for.

I didn’t thank either one of them for the event itself—for the act of getting together. That would have implied that it had been a charitable gesture of some sort, and I most certainly was not in need of charity.

So I turned up my collar, and gave both of them a jaunty wave of my cane, and set off through the downpour as cocky as you please.

Though I’d have to say that I felt a little, maybe, woebegone as I drove home alone.

The outside light was supposed to come on automatically at dusk, but the bulb must have burned out. A damned nuisance in the rain. I stepped in a couple of puddles as I was walking up the sidewalk to my house, and my trouser cuffs were already wet enough as it was. I unlocked the door and reached inside to turn the hall light on, but that was burned out, too. And when I pushed the door wider open, I met with some kind of resistance. A gravelly sound startled me. I peered down at the dark hall floor and made out several white and irregular objects. I nudged them with my foot. Rocks? No, plaster, chips of plaster. I pushed the door harder and it opened a few more inches. My eyes had adjusted by now. Against the black of the floor I saw scatterings of white and then a mound of white—pebbles and clods and sheets of white. And now that I thought about it, the air I was
breathing was full of dust. I could feel an urge to cough pressing my throat. And I heard a loud, steady dripping from somewhere inside the house.

I closed the door again. I went back to my car, stepping in the same two puddles on the way, and got behind the steering wheel, where I spent several minutes collecting my thoughts. Then I drew a deep, shaky breath and fitted my key into the ignition.

And that is how it happened that I went to live with my sister.

4

N
andina lived in the house we’d grown up in, a brown-shingled foursquare north of Wyndhurst. Even in the rain, it was only a five-minute drive. I almost wished it were longer. When I got there I parked out front, but then I stayed in the car a minute, debating how I should word this. I didn’t want to confess the true state of my house, because Nandina had been nagging me for weeks now to get started on the repairs. But if I just showed up with no explanation and asked for my old room back, she would think I was having a nervous breakdown or something. She would turn all motherly and there-there. She would be
thrilled
.

Well. As sometimes happens, she surprised me. She opened the front door when I rang and she sized up the situation—my slicked hair, damp clothes, the flecks of white plaster clinging to my trouser cuffs—and then she said, “Come in and stand on the mat while I fetch a towel.”

“I’ve got—got a little water in my front hall,” I told her.

She was heading toward the kitchen now, but she called back, “Take your shoes off and leave them there.”

“I was thinking maybe, just for tonight—”

But she had disappeared. I stood dripping on the mat, breathing in the smells of my childhood—Johnson’s paste wax and musty wallpaper. Even in the daytime the house was dark, with its small, oddly placed windows and heavy fabrics, and tonight it looked so dim that I kept feeling the need to blink to clear my vision.

“Your shoes, Aaron. Take off your shoes,” Nandina said, returning. She had a faded dishtowel with her. She waited while I shucked my shoes off and removed my brace, and then she handed me the towel. It was one of those calendar towels our mother used to hang above the kitchen table.
1975
, it said. I mopped my face and then my hair. Nandina said, “Where’s your cane?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you leave it in the car?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you bring any clothes with you?”

“No.”

She stepped a bit closer, although she knew better than to offer an arm, and we made our way into the living room. She smelled of shampoo. She was wearing a gingham housecoat. (My sister was one of the last remaining women in America who changed into a housecoat at the end of every workday.) She waited for me to get settled on the couch, and then she said, “I’m going to see if you have any slippers here.”

I probably did. I had plenty of other stuff. Our mother had never cleared my room out after I left home.

While Nandina was upstairs, I slumped back on the couch and gazed up at the ceiling. It was a really solid ceiling, the old-fashioned,
cream plaster kind with a medallion in the center, not so much as a hairline crack anywhere in view.

I thought about the car my college roommate used to drive, a rusty heap of a Chevy that kept sputtering out for no reason. One day it died altogether, and he got out and unscrewed the license plate and walked away from it; never looked back. I wished I could do that with my house. I wouldn’t miss a single thing about it. Let it vanish from the face of the earth. It wouldn’t bother me in the least.

Nandina came back with a pair of corduroy moccasins that I’d completely forgotten. Then she brought me my brace, which I strapped on before I fitted my feet into the moccasins. “Now,” Nandina said. “Have you had supper?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Aaron,”
she said.

“What?”

“Tell the truth, now.”

“I’ve had half a dozen raw oysters, a crab cake, garlic mashed potatoes, a Green Goddess salad, a seven-apple tart à la mode, and two glasses of wine.”

“Goodness,” Nandina said.

I tried not to look smug.

“And what, exactly,” she asked, “is the current state of your house?”

“Ah.” I considered. “Well, at the moment my hall ceiling seems to have taken on a bit of water.”

“I see.”

“It could happen to anyone,” I told her. “It rained all last night, remember, and all today.”

Nandina said, “It seems to me—”

“But we can t-t-talk about that to-tomorrow,” I told her. “Meanwhile, I am
beat
. Are there sheets on my old bed?”

“Of course.”

Yes, of course; why did I bother asking? I stood up and made a big show of yawning and stretching. “Guess I’ll toddle off, then,” I said. “Thanks for taking me in on such short notice. I promise I won’t be in your hair more than a night or two.”