by Tom Perrotta
Her reaction was the same every time she started a session: Ugh! How could they do it? How could people expose themselves like this? Just the sight of all that naked flesh was overwhelming and off-putting. She cringed at the unimaginative dirty talk and the predictability of the action. She especially hated the clips that focused solely on the genitalia, the close-ups of penises and vaginas. So many assholes. She needed to see faces, to get a sense of the person she was watching. That was the only thing that mattered.
It was like a blind date or a party. Some people you liked right away, some you didn’t. Some you weren’t sure about. The saucy soccer mom was horrible, a giggly woman performing a clumsy striptease with the TV blaring in the background. Eve clicked out of that, tried “Swedish MILF Pink Dildo!” then “Italian Wife Deepthroat” and “Sexy Abigail Morning Fuck.” None of them did anything for her.
But there was always another one. And eventually—tonight it was “Classy Lady Loves That Cock!”—something would click. The couple on her screen would seem inspired, or even blessed—you could see how alive and happy and unself-conscious they were—and maybe you envied them a little, but you also wanted to thank them for sharing this moment with you, and then that last barrier would crumble, and maybe for a minute or two you’d feel that you were right there with them, like when you heard a good song on the radio and the next thing you knew you were singing along.
PART TWO
The End of Reluctance
Trouble in Sunset Acres
It was only Thursday afternoon, but Amanda Olney could already feel the weekend coming on like an illness—a mild case of the flu or some mid-level gastrointestinal distress, the kind of ailment that didn’t leave you bedridden but kept you confined to the couch, unfit for human interaction. You just had to wait it out in your sweatpants, bingeing on Netflix and herbal tea, a forty-eight-hour quarantine until Monday rolled around and you could head back to work.
She understood how pathetic that sounded, exactly the opposite of how you were supposed to feel if you were a youngish single person with an office job that paid less-than-peanuts and made a mockery of your expensive education; a job, moreover, that required you to spend a good part of your life in the company of old people, some of them physically and/or mentally infirm, and many others just plain ornery. You were supposed to love the weekend, that all-too-brief window of freedom, your only chance to wash away the stink of boredom with a blast of fun. Use it to drink and fuck yourself into a state of blissful oblivion, the memory of which would power you through the work week that followed, at the end of which you could do it all over again, ad infinitum, or at least until you met the right guy (or gal) and settled down.
Well, Amanda had tried all that, and it had depressed the shit out of her. Better to be a nun than to spend every Sunday beating herself up about the bad choices she’d made on Friday and Saturday night. In fact, at this particular juncture in her life, she wouldn’t have minded if the weekend were abolished altogether. She would have been fine coming to work seven days a week, barricading herself behind her beige metal desk, making phone calls and filling out paperwork, finding budget-conscious ways to keep the geezers of Haddington occupied while they ran out the clock on their golden years.
Aside from organizing events and activities at the Senior Center, Amanda was responsible for putting out a monthly newsletter called Haddington Happenings. One of the regular features was a chatty roundup of notable events that had transpired since the last issue—the birth of Eleanor Testa’s seventh grandchild, Lou LeGrande’s excellent recovery from open heart surgery, Dick and Marilyn Hauser’s golden anniversary. She was adding a few items to the list—Three cheers for Joy Maloney, who came in fifth in the Seventy-and-Over Division at last month’s 5K Fun Run at Finley Park. Way to go, Joy! You’re an inspiration to us all! And congratulations to Art Weber on the ten-pound bluefish he caught on Cape Cod. It was almost as big as the one that got away, right Art?—when Eve Fletcher poked her head into the tiny windowless office.
“Hey,” she said. “Did you figure out the bus thing?”
Amanda nodded, pleased to be the bearer of good news.
“It took some doing, but I finally got through to the owner and explained the situation. He says they’ll give us a motor coach for the same price.”
“With a working rest room?”
“That’s what he said.”
Eve heaved a theatrical sigh of relief.
“Thank God. There was no way I was gonna put a bunch of old people on a school bus for a trip to Foxwoods. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
“We’re all set on our end,” Amanda assured her. “The rest is up to Frank Sinatra Jr.”
“I’m sure he’ll be great.” Eve’s voice was confident, but her face expressed an alternative viewpoint. “I wish I could join you, but I have a class that night.”
“No worries,” Amanda told her. “I got this.”
“Excellent.” Eve brought her hands together in a soundless clap. “Well, enjoy the rest of your day. I’m checking out a little early.”
“Lucky you.”
“Not really. I’m going to a wake. Roy Rafferty.”
“Oh.” Amanda grimaced in sympathy. “I heard about that. Poor man.”
“You wanna come?”
Amanda glanced at her computer screen. “I kinda have to finish this article.”
“No worries,” Eve said, retreating from the doorway. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
*
The final chunk of the workday felt endless, that infinitely expanding space between four thirty and five, when there was nothing left to do but surf the web and pretend to look busy in case one of her co-workers wandered by in the hallway. In a more humane and rational workplace—one of those Bay Area tech companies with ping-pong tables and espresso machines and nap rooms that she was so sick of hearing about—she could have called it a day and headed out into the fresh air, but the Senior Center was old-school government work. You got paid for keeping your ass in the chair, not for the quality of your ideas or the tasks you accomplished. It was one more example of how upside-down everything was. Wouldn’t it be a lot fairer if drones like her got to have the flexible hours and the hipster amenities? The people with the six-figure salaries could buy their own damn macchiatos.
On reflection, she wished she’d accepted Eve’s half-serious invitation to join her at Roy Rafferty’s wake. Not that it would have been much fun, sitting in a funeral home at the tail end of a beautiful fall afternoon, but at least they would have been able to drive there together, maybe go out for a drink afterward. Just a chance to hang out a bit, get to know each other a little better outside the context of work.
Amanda wasn’t sure if she wanted Eve to be a mentor or a friend, but there was room in her life for both. Or maybe she was just missing her mother—it had only been six months since her death, though most of the time it felt like yesterday—and looking for a substitute, an older, wiser woman to lean on for emotional support, not that Eve was anywhere close to her mother’s age, or had shown any interest in being part of Amanda’s support system. If anything, she seemed a little sad herself—Amanda had totally caught her crying in her office that one time, though Eve had denied it—which just made Amanda like her that much more, and wish they could slip past the rigid, artificial boundary that separated boss and employee, and find a way to meet each other as equals.
*
She was clicking through a viral list she was pretty sure she’d seen before—29 Celebs You Totally Didn’t Know Were Bi—when the phone rang. Her laptop clock said 4:52, late enough to make the call seem like an imposition, if it wasn’t some sort of emergency.
“Events,” she said cautiously. “Amanda speaking.”
“Hello, Amanda,” said the sandpapery female voice on the other end. “This is Grace Lucas.”
“Okay.” The name meant nothing to Amanda. “Can I help you?”
“You don’t know me,” Grace Lucas continued
. She sounded a little off, possibly medicated. “I’m Garth Heely’s wife.”
Of course you are, Amanda thought irritably. When you had a job like events coordinator, there was always someone making your life miserable. At the moment, for Amanda, this someone was Garth Heely, an obscure local author scheduled to speak at the Senior Center’s monthly lecture series in November. A retired lawyer, Garth Heely had self-published three novels featuring Parker Winslow, a silver-haired sleuth who plies his trade at Sunset Acres, a senior living community with an unusually high murder rate. Amanda had read them all—it was her job!—and they were better than she’d expected, except that the killer in all three books turned out to be a person of color—a Jamaican nurse in Trouble in Sunset Acres, an Indian urologist in More Trouble in Sunset Acres, and a Guatemalan physical therapist in Mayhem in Sunset Acres. When she’d pointed out this unfortunate pattern—diplomatically, she thought—Garth Heely got immediately defensive, telling her he was fed up with all this PC crap you heard nowadays, everybody so focused on the color of everybody else’s skin, rather than the content of their character. Then he suggested that maybe she was the racist, lumping all non-white people into a single category, as if there were no difference between Kingston and Calcutta.
Have you ever been to Calcutta? he demanded.
Amanda admitted that she hadn’t.
Well, I have, he said. And believe me, honey, it ain’t a bit like Jamaica!
Amanda wasn’t surprised by his attitude of aggrieved innocence. It was something she’d gotten used to, working at the Senior Center. A lot of old white people acted like it was still 1956, like they could say whatever they wanted and not have to take any responsibility for their words. Soon after she’d gotten hired, she’d called out a couple of women for using the N-word in casual conversation—they were both knitting baby sweaters—and they’d looked at her like she was making a big deal out of nothing, since there were no black people within hearing range. There rarely were; Haddington was that kind of town.
Garth Heely wasn’t an out-and-out racist, just a prosperous, occasionally charming white man of a certain age, blind to his own privilege, predictably smug and condescending. The only thing that surprised her was what a diva he had turned out to be, considering that he was a writer no one had ever heard of, with an Amazon ranking somewhere in the millions.
“What can I do for you, ma’am?”
“I’m calling on behalf of my husband,” Grace Lucas said. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to cancel his speaking engagement.”
Oh Jesus, Amanda thought.
Just yesterday, she and Garth Heely had butted heads about the flyers the Senior Center had designed to promote his lecture. He thought they looked boring—guilty as charged—and suggested that they be printed on several different shades of eye-catching colored paper, preferably pink, yellow, and light blue. Amanda explained that this wouldn’t be possible, since the Senior Center’s budget didn’t allow for colored paper.
“Hello?” Grace Lucas said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.” Amanda’s skin felt clammy beneath her dress. She’d only been working at the Senior Center for a few months, and the last thing she needed was to walk into Eve’s office and explain that the November speaker had canceled over a trivial dispute. “Please tell Mr. Heely that I misspoke. We’ll be more than happy to supply colored paper for the flyers.”
The silence on the other end of the line felt more puzzled than frosty. Amanda was about to add an apology to the offer when Grace Lucas finally spoke.
“Garth is dead, dear.”
“What?” Amanda started to laugh, then caught herself. “I talked to him yesterday morning. He was fine.”
“I know.” There was a note of quiet wonder in Grace Lucas’s voice. “He died right afterward. You were the last person to speak to him. He was still holding the phone when I found him.”
Oh my God, Amanda thought. I killed him.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Thank you, dear.” Grace Lucas gave a resigned sigh. “I just wish he’d been able to finish the book he was working on. He said it was going to be his best Parker Winslow yet. Now we’ll never know who the murderer was.”
Amanda wanted to ask if there was a non-white health care worker in the book—There’s your killer!—but she was distracted by an embarrassing feeling of relief, the knowledge that Garth Heely’s sudden death was going to be a lot easier to explain to Eve than a disagreement over colored paper would have been.
“I’m going to bury him in his blue suit.” Grace Lucas’s voice was dreamy and private, as if she were talking to herself. “He always looked so good in blue.”
* * *
Wakes and funerals were an inescapable part of Eve’s professional life, and she tried to approach them with a businesslike sense of detachment. She showed up in her official capacity, she paid her respects to the family of the deceased, and she went home. No fuss, no muss, no tears.
Tonight, though, she was a bit of a wreck. The news of Roy Rafferty’s death had upset her deeply, coming so soon after she’d banished him for exposing himself in the ladies’ room. She didn’t feel guilty about her decision—as an administrator, she’d really had no choice—but the memory of it still made her sick at heart. It seemed so cruel and pointless in retrospect, humiliating a sick old man who had only a month to live, not that she had any way of knowing that at the time. All she knew was that she’d inflicted pain on someone she cared about, and that always cost you something, even if you were just doing your job. It left you feeling dirty and mean, exposed to the laws of karma. It also made her wonder if she was doing the right thing by coming here.
A lot of the wakes she went to were woefully underpopulated affairs, a corpse and some flowers and a handful of bored spectators, no one even bothering to pretend that it was a big deal. Eve was relieved to see that this wasn’t the case tonight. The parking lot was packed, and so was the viewing room, an impressive line of mourners massed along the side wall, inching their way toward the open coffin. The turnout was a tribute to Roy’s lifelong ties to Haddington, his membership in a variety of civic organizations, and his long and successful career as a plumbing contractor, not to mention the fact that he’d been a genuinely nice guy before the dementia kicked in.
Instead of joining the procession, Eve slipped into a velour-cushioned chair in the second to last row of the viewing room, near a group of ladies who were regulars at the Senior Center. One of them was Evelyn Gerardi, the emphysemic woman who’d been the victim of Roy’s indecent overtures.
“So sad,” Eve whispered. “Such a shame.”
The ladies nodded in mournful agreement, murmuring that Roy was a sweetheart and a good father and so handsome when he was young. Eve turned to face the coffin, which was obscured by a wall of dark suits and somber dresses. She sat quietly for a while, trying to summon a mental image of the dead man—not the confused troublemaker he’d been near the end, but the gruff, garrulous man she’d gotten to know a decade earlier, a stocky guy with a silver-gray brush cut and an impish twinkle in his eyes. He always wore Hawaiian shirts on Friday—his favorite had pineapples and parrots on it—and he liked to flirt with the female employees of the Center, Eve included.
What she remembered best about him was the way he’d cared for his wife after the death of their oldest son, five or six years ago now. Joan had taken it hard—how could she not? Nick was still her baby, even if he’d been fifty-two years old at the time of his death—and it seemed like all the joy and vitality drained out of her after that. Roy began holding her hand in public, something he’d never done before, and treating her with immense politeness, pulling out her chair before she sat down, helping her on with her coat, checking on her in a soft and solicitous voice. That was the man Eve was here to honor, and she hoped the Rafferty family would accept her condolences without bitterness, and forgive her for the unfortunate role she’d played in the final chapter of his life.
The line had shrunk considerably by the time she got up and made her way to the viewing pedestal, breathing through her mouth to avoid the sickly odor of the funeral bouquets, which always made her a little light-headed. She hated this part of the ritual, that chilling moment when you were face-to-face with an object that appeared to be a clumsy wax replica of someone you knew but was, of course, the actual person. As usual, everything about the presentation seemed slightly off, from the gray suit Roy was wearing—in Eve’s opinion, a windbreaker and a Hawaiian shirt would have been the way to go—to the pack of Camels and the bag of beef jerky that had been placed in the coffin to speed him on his way. Neither item seemed appropriate: Roy had quit smoking and sworn off red meat years ago. But the real problem was the vacant look on his face. Roy was a people person, always happy to see you, and interested in what you had to say, even if you were just chatting about the weather. Apathy didn’t suit him at all.
Some people kissed the dead person’s forehead, but it seemed both creepy and theatrical to Eve, not to mention vaguely unsanitary. She settled for patting him twice on the hand, very quickly.
“Goodbye,” she whispered. “We’re gonna miss you.”
All three of Roy’s surviving children were standing on the receiving line, and none of them seemed to think it odd or presumptuous for her to be there. Both of the daughters—Kim and Debbie were their names, though Eve couldn’t remember which was which—hugged her and told her how much their father loved coming to the Senior Center, and how highly he’d spoken of the people who worked there. Eve assured them that the feeling was mutual, and that their father was a lovely man who’d brightened everyone’s day.
George Rafferty was more reserved than his sisters, but he didn’t seem like he was holding a grudge. He seemed a little dazed, or maybe just exhausted.