by Tom Perrotta
“Fuck out of my way.” This solid-framed black guy wearing a Warriors tank threw his shoulder into me and flicked a pair of scratch-off lottery tickets into my face. One flapped harmlessly off the side of my nose, but the other caught me corner-on in the eye.
A couple of seconds basking in a private ray of sun and see what you get?
This is the hardest part for me to tell.
Rand’s friend’s Tahoe house was an A-frame enclosed in a grove of trees, overlooking the boat launch at Fallen Leaf Lake. It had been a long, grueling drive from San Francisco, and Claire had been strangely noncommunicative the whole time, so I was drained and tense. I really wanted this weekend to go well. And when I stepped out of the car, saw the house, caught a view of moonlight flashing on the lake below, and breathed in the crisp, weightless mountain air, I felt certain, for the first time, that it would. I even started fantasizing about staying past the weekend—turning a two-day getaway into a new and better kind of life. You could grow hillside zinfandel on the ferociously sunny, cool slopes of the Sierra, a thousand feet or so below us. We had enough wine-world contacts; we could get some land, plant vines, make a little name for ourselves, and live up here where the air tasted so good and no cell phones worked.
When I gave a little fist pump of pleasure, Claire broke into her first smile since San Francisco and kissed me and told me she was glad she’d come—as if she’d been debating the question.
Inside, I slept a hard, dreamless ten hours under scratchy sheets and heavy camp blankets. In the morning, first thing, I wanted to hike a trail above the house, and so we climbed to a rocky ridge and lay together on a flat table-sized rock in brilliant morning sunshine. Claire pulled her T-shirt up to her armpits to get some sun on her stomach, then took the shirt off completely. Her nipples stood up through the sports bra. I brushed the back of my hand against her thigh, but she gently pushed me off. Someone might see us, she said.
She was fast and strong getting back down the trail, and misinterpreting this as horniness, I half-jogged after her, excited, bursting through the door and lifting her to the kitchen counter. Claire’s lips were warm, her neck salty, and I clutched her to me hungrily. She flattened her hand on my chest. “Breakfast,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”
Apart from half a box of Ritz crackers and a six-pack of Sierra Nevada, that was true. So sex would have to wait for a grocery store run into the town of South Lake. As I crossed the Safeway lot, my phone found a signal and beeped with a stored voicemail message from Brian. If I even cared, he said, the doctor says Mom has to lose the breast. She’d go into the hospital next week. Maybe now I would come home?
Bacon, Goldfish, two cans of tuna, and multigrain English muffins went into the shopping cart. I got back to the house; Claire looked in the bag and asked me what the hell was wrong with me.
Taking her in my arms, I told her I was distracted—the truth. I buried my face in her hair, kissed her beauty mark. I pulled down her shorts and smacked her plump butt. She yelped and arched her back, and so I did it again, harder, a blow that stung my hand.
“Easy,” she said.
I ran my fingers into her hair and bunched it in my fist.
“Stop,” she said, breathless. “Stop. Lewis.”
It was cool in the house, but sweat had broken out along her brow and in the hollow of her neck.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, with a severity and an impatience that surprised me.
She turned her body away from mine, ran the tap, and cupped water into her mouth. She’d been talking to her therapist, she said, about how her ex had treated her. Her therapist had said it was important to maintain a sense of serenity; gentleness was what she needed.
So we did it in the bed, and I was slow and careful, and she brought herself off with her fingers. That fucking guy, I thought the whole time. I hadn’t been in a fight since seventh grade, but I wanted to teach the ex in Mexico a lesson. Knock him over. Get in his face.
I calmed down after I’d come and eaten a bacon sandwich and taken a shower. Claire was out on the deck, reading some Robin Cook paperback she’d found by the couch and smoking a cigarette. I munched Goldfish and watched her tip her head back to exhale. I remembered that fight in seventh grade: a gang of eighth-graders—Brian’s friends—who’d pulled me into a stand of magnolia trees and held me down and rabbit-punched my arms and legs until they were numb. Not so much a fight as a beating.
The plan was cocktails, slots, blackjack—goofy, sleazy fun! But Stateline is a sad place: four shabby casinos squatting on the Nevada side of U.S. 50. Pulling into Harrah’s—the least depressing-looking of the four—idling behind a jumbo bus disgorging a parade of seventy-somethings, Claire and I considered driving back to our cozy house in the woods, lighting the gas fire, and drinking that six-pack.
But we’d come all this way. So in we went and straight to the buffet, where a stump of prime rib, steam trays of crusty mashed potatoes, and traffic-cone-colored mac-and-cheese put us off dinner. Claire led me back to the casino floor and squeezed in between two old men in cowboy hats at a $5-bid table. I brought her a gin and tonic, got myself two, and watched Claire turn $60 into $300 and then into $40, at which point she pushed back from the table and suggested quarter slots. I kept thinking of how she’d looked on the flat rock under the blue sky, her skin white as paper. I was drinking more than I should—because the gin kept the depressing chill of Harrah’s off me, and because drinks were half price, thanks to a mess in the middle of the gaming floor: a chandelier had come down on a roulette table, and there was yellow police tape around the debris. Wires dangled out of a jagged hole in the ceiling.
Over at the quarter slots, I worked through $20 in about six minutes—all I wanted to spend. Claire hit a few times: spinning lights, a siren, and a clattering waterfall of coins. Staring at her half-full bucket, I thought of how, when we were kids, Brian used to savor his bowl of ice cream after I’d plowed through mine, and then would taunt me with how much he had left. I was feeling resentful that Claire had brought up her ex. I could feel my poor judgment take over, like a powerful muscle, a delicious feeling of coiled intent.
I rattled the single quarter in my bucket. I swiveled on my slot machine stool and said, “If this one hits, you have to marry me.”
“You’re on,” Claire said. She shook her own bucket of quarters and blew her bangs straight up. She’d had a few drinks herself.
“I’m infatuated with you.”
“I know. It’s really sweet.”
“Every time I think my life is falling apart—boom, there you are.”
“Boom,” she mimicked. “What do you mean falling apart?”
I stuck the quarter in, pulled the knob, and came up Bar, Lemon, Cherries.
“Lucky guy,” she said, teasingly. “You know, there’s a wedding chapel upstairs. I would have held you to it.”
That got me down on my knee.
“You’re cute,” she said, and then a sad awareness spread across her face.
“Claire Baldessari.” I took her hands in mine and looked into her fearful brown eyes.
“Lewis, stop. You’re not thinking.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to ask you.”
“Seriously. I’ll say no.”
By this point I’d attracted a little audience, a pair of old ladies in matching pink blouses and mesh cowgirl hats. A guy running a floor waxer, who snapped off the noisy machine to see what I was going to say.
“I’ve been in touch with him,” Claire blurted. “He wants me to come down there.”
“Who?” And then: Oh.
She stared gloomily at the slot machine. She drank her gin and tonic in one long go. “Sometimes I think I’m getting better,” she said. “Other times?” She wiped her chin.
The cowgirls turned their heads. The guy switched his waxer back on.
I drove us back to the A-frame in silence. I opened the door and kicked off my shoes. Claire said she had to pee, and after ten mi
nutes or so, she hadn’t returned. I went into the bedroom to look for her.
“What are you doing?”
She was packing her bag. “I don’t want to have to in the morning.”
I tried to find the lake through the bay window, but it was a cloudy night, and the view was a texture map of trees and leaves. “Maybe we should just go now,” I said. “Go home.”
I didn’t mean it. I was tired. Neither of us was equipped to drive the five hours to San Francisco, but Claire nodded, evidently relieved. She said she’d take the first shift at the wheel.
She rode the shoulders, straddled the center line through the S-curves. I didn’t see him. I heard Claire’s cry of alarm and felt the car fishtail sideways.
Thud thud. Deer.
Claire’s hands hovered above the wheel. I got out of the car and saw a man sprawled face-down behind a rock, legs splayed. Couldn’t see his face, only a glimpse of bearded chin. Boots, no laces, one half off, revealing a dingy wool sock. Unconscious, breathing—not dead. Shards of a bottle winking at me in the gravel. Blood? I didn’t actually go look. The highway was dead still.
Call it a trial, and twenty-three-year-old me with a choice to make. Except I didn’t see the choice. Untie the rope, pull for the surface. Back in the car.
At the Shell station, after calling 911, Claire told me what her story to the cops would be: we’d had a fight back at the house in South Lake, and she’d taken off in the car without me. She’d driven away after the accident only because her cell didn’t work, and she needed to call for help.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “I’m going back up there with you.”
She shook her head. I’d never seen her so calm and settled. There was a roadside motel less than a mile away I could walk to, she said. Get a room for a few hours’ sleep, and if she could, she’d pick me up in the morning—or better probably just to call a Sacramento taxi service and catch a bus back to San Francisco on my own. She had no idea how long this would take.
“C’mon,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”
No, no way, I said, but she looked at me as if I knew as well as she did that this was the best plan. Still I said no, but the forcefulness dropped out of my voice. Eventually I exited the car, and Claire arranged herself behind the wheel, hitched the seat forward, and started the engine. She reversed the car—no visible dents anywhere—then blew me a kiss through the open window and told me to take care of myself. “Take care of yourself, Lewis,” like that, and a long, consoling smile—a final goodbye if I’ve ever seen one. But I was slow on the uptake. I simply thought: big fine, license suspended. The guy had practically been standing in the road, on the downhill shoulder of a four-lane mountain highway, at midnight. The word manslaughter looped through my head one or two times, but I chased it away.
I caught a ride all the way to Sacramento with an old Mexican guy in a Ford F-150. Thankfully, he didn’t want to talk. I camped out at the Sacramento bus terminal and bought a ticket for the first Greyhound to San Francisco.
“You’re home early,” Rand said when I came through the door. “Did you win rent?” He was sprawled on the couch, wrapped in a sleeping bag, watching the 49ers lose and drinking orange juice straight from the carton. The look on my face made him wince. “That’s a joke. Look, no pressure. I know you’re good for it. Want some of this?”
I went straight to the bedroom to charge my phone. It had been dead for hours, and I was sure it was stacked with voicemails from Claire.
I lay on my bed and stared up at the water-stained stucco and thought of my mother and brother in Pensacola and how contemptuous I could be about their small, provincial lives. A line of ants climbed a stack of magazines beside the bed. There weren’t any messages. I felt homesick for the first time in five years.
By the time I’d reached Claire’s apartment on Dolores Street, my eye still hurt, and my vision was watery and out of focus. I climbed to her doorbell, punched it, and heard heavy footsteps inside—unmistakably male. I could have turned around and taken cover down the block, but I didn’t, and the door opened, and I was facing a sandy-haired guy in his late thirties with a leather cuff on his wrist and grapevine tattoos on his arms.
Behind him, up the interior stairs, were Claire’s legs, just a glimpse of them, her shins and the base of her right knee.
“Hey, brother,” Chad the golfer said. He smelled like her perfume. “Can’t let you in.”
“Claire?” I called past him.
Chad stepped through the door and pulled it closed behind him. “You want to help her? Tell the police you were in the car, tell them whose idea it was to drive away.”
“What’s this?” I asked, wiping my eye. “Are you two—what?”
“She’s messed up in the head. Cops are threatening her with felony leaving-the-scene ’cause they think she’s covering up for Mr. Venezuela. And she won’t put you in the car. She thinks this is what she deserves for treating you the way she did,” Chad said, in a reasonable voice. “Felony, brother. Girl is sinking into something.”
“You’re her new boyfriend?”
Chad just gave me a bewildered look. He had lines around his eyes, a shell necklace. I swayed on my feet, and he put a hand on my arm. I was oddly grateful for the contact and support. “Talk to the police, and it’ll be better for both of you. You want to do the right thing, don’t you?”
“Claire!”
Success! The door started to open, and I readied myself to charge past Chad, scoop her up, and carry her off. But what I saw stopped me. It’s not like I’d been having a great week, but at least I’d been eating, bathing, venturing outside. Claire, on the other hand—her face was rinsed of color, her hair matted, her legs spindly and frail; she squinted and lifted a trembling hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Fresh bandages on her forearms.
“Heads up,” Chad said, nodding over my shoulder.
The squad car that had passed me three times on the way here had pulled to the curb, its lights spinning. A single whoop of siren got my attention.
In Pensacola the sun stays low through the short January afternoons, and the light skims across the gulf. From the office where I now work, I watch pelicans hang hungrily in the air. I watch them gather themselves and bomb into the drink.
My job is to create payment spreadsheets and invoices for the lawyers at Brian’s firm. I’m basically a secretary, but guess what? McMillian, Yates, and Brewer is in fact paying me twice what I was making at the Wine Gazette. Overpaying me actually, given how baggy my days are, how much time I have to stare through the homey gingham window treatments near my desk and watch the action (Jet Skis, sailboats, seagulls, those pelicans) on the gulf.
Mom’s doing okay. Not great. She lost the breast, and now she’s on a new cycle of chemo because the doctor found another small tumor. He thinks the chemo will take care of it, but that’s what he said before the mastectomy. She’s lost most of her hair and is tired all the time, but likes having her sons close by. Brian or I will try to help her off the sofa, and she’ll wave us off. “I’m hardy,” she’ll say, hauling herself up. “Pilgrim stock.” Brian’s glad I’m here, though he won’t admit that. I know because he’s got a girlfriend, a tattooed cocktail waitress named Sally, who told me. She comes over and cooks chowders and oyster stews mild enough that Mom can eat them. Surprisingly, Mom likes Sally, and Brian seems to be laying off the bourbon, has dropped some weight, and is playing soccer again.
We don’t talk much, Brian and me, though I catch rides with him to the firm. I like to walk home along the water. It’s two or three miles to our house, but I enjoy the exercise. I ask myself why I fell so hard for a girl who didn’t fall for me. Why I proposed to her. Why I left an injured man on the side of the road. Sometimes asking these questions makes me think I’ve changed—grown up a little—and then I’ll see boat masts tipping back and forth in the harbor like metronome needles, and I get this overwhelming urge to try to steal one of them and set sail for, like, Havana.
; Amazing: Rand actually invested $250,000 of WestLab money in www.thewinegazette.com—specifically Marv’s subscription database. After my community service hours were done, and before I left San Francisco, I helped Marv write a proposal and business plan and hand-delivered it to Rand, who stuffed it in his Quiksilver backpack. Long shot, I told Marv. But Rand emailed the other day to tell me the news and to offer me a consulting fee of $5,000. Yes, please.
Samuel Gaerig came out of his coma; his broken ribs and broken leg healed. Rand’s lawyer, who took my case (pro bono), got his name for me, and I’ve been calling the halfway house in Sacramento where he’s supposed to be living to see how he’s doing. Not well. Gaerig is a drug addict (heroin and crack), as well as an alcoholic. He had dementia before the accident. He keeps running off, disappearing for days. Claire is the liable party for any injury suit Mr. Gaerig brings, but Brian says given his mental problems, she could get out of it with a good lawyer. Claire pled no contest to the felony hit-and-run but avoided jail. She lost her license, got two years supervised probation, and a $1,000 fine. This news came to me via my lawyer.
I pled guilty to misdemeanor failure to lend assistance and spent ninety hours dressed in a green jumpsuit in Golden Gate Park, wielding one of those pincher tools, picking up soda cans, junk food wrappers, and more used condoms than anyone wants to hear about. Did your time, Brian says. Put the whole thing behind you.
But I have these nightmares—not about that night on Route 50, about small stuff. A couple of papers I’d plagiarized in college. This lie I told my mother to get her to send me $500 (trip to dentist, three fillings needed). A six-pack I stole from the corner store near my old apartment in San Francisco. I wake up, jaw tight, covers and sheets thrashed to the floor, desperate to tell someone, anyone, I’m sorry.