Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  Out for a Drink

  (2016)

  TWO OLD FRIENDS, LARS AND MARY, meet for drinks at a bar they frequented fifty years earlier, up on Twenty-first Street in Tacoma, Washington. Mary lives in Berkeley now, but for a decade before moving there, she worked for Lars, selling Jaguars at his automobile agency. Strange to say—from Lars’s point of view—these days Mary is a respected Bay Area artist, known for cutting up earlier paintings and hanging strips of them on clean blue canvases. Lars has one in his den at home. He doesn’t like it much but loves the fact that Mary made it, and that her work often sells for upward of ten thousand dollars. He paid nine for his and thinks of it as a sound investment.

  “I’m surprised you’d want such a thing,” says Mary when he tells her about his purchase. “I think I remember you had an actual Edward Hopper in your office at work.”

  “Hopper knockoff,” Lars says. “I used to tell people it was real, but it was only worth a couple thousand bucks.”

  Mary leans closer in order to gaze into his eyes. He thinks she’s remembering their friendship, but she is looking for dollar signs. She lightly slaps the side of her face. “It never occurred to me that the Hopper wasn’t real,” she says.

  Lars thinks the face slap is cute. He tells her that his grandfather bought the painting.

  “The man who started your company? I met him a couple of times.”

  When Lars asks her what she’d like to drink, she tells him pinot gris, but he comes back from the bar with pinot noir.

  “Sorry to hear about your mom,” he says.

  The reason for Mary’s return to Tacoma is the death of her mother at ninety-six. “I’m sorry, too, though she was a very tough nut to crack.”

  “Like my grandpa,” says Lars. “Right up to the day he died he kept telling me how to run my company.”

  Mary remembers Lars’s ability for turning every conversation into one about himself. He was a decent boss, but now she has to wonder why she let him know she was in town. She’d called Richie, too, another old friend, but Richie hasn’t called her back.

  “Do you ever see Richie?” she asks. “Since I started painting, I often remember how crazy he was to become a writer. Do you know if he ever became one?”

  “He did,” says Lars, “but you didn’t hear? Richie’s in hospice now.”

  Mary wraps her hands around her wineglass, the muscles in her jaw contracting. For a moment, she feels she might be sick. Back in college, she and Richie worked together at this very bar. Often they would close the place and stay into the wee hours of the morning, drinking and talking. He was her absolute pal and her only platonic male friend. She says, “I can’t believe I didn’t know this. I’ve got to go see him. What’s wrong with Richie, Lars?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Leprosy? Syphilis? I’ve lost touch.”

  Syphilis? What?

  A smirk sneaks across Lars’s face, red and spreading out. Mary nearly throws her wine at him. “Lars,” she says, “you made that up?”

  She stands and picks up her coat, thinking, good fucking Christ!

  “He might as well be in hospice, dead as he is to me,” says Lars. “But come on, Mary, don’t you want to know why I’d say such a thing? And maybe why Richie hasn’t called you back?”

  She does want to know those things, but she’s beyond furious. Who says such a thing about an old friend? She shoves the wineglass across the table at him. “Get me a beer, then,” she barks.

  When he heads to the bar, she sits back down, her back as rigid as a two-by-four. She forgot about Tacoma’s tangled web, forgot how lucky she’s been to escape it. Her husband sometimes tells her that Tacoma is a bruise she plucks at, caused by the unfinished business of her childhood. But she often misses the place. Richie in hospice, though … goddamn!

  “I got us a couple of IPAs,” Lars says when he returns. When he sees her anger’s not diminished, he adds, “I only said it because I figured after what Richie did, you’d get the joke. I’m sorry to have scared you like that.”

  “Nothing Richie could do would make me want him dead, you shit.”

  “Yeah? Well, say that again after you’ve read his book. Three of his stories are about me, full of lies and half-truths, and you’re in two. You bask in the glory of your own beauty, then go off to marry a chemist.”

  “I did marry a chemist,” Mary says. “Richie has been keeping tabs.”

  “Keeping tabs and taking notes. But he also thought he had the right to make stuff up. He says you slept with customers to get them to buy Jaguars, back when you worked for me.”

  He looks at her slyly. “You never did that, did you?”

  “No!” says Mary. “Who, me?”

  She takes out her phone, shows Lars the number she’s got for Richie, and when he confirms it, she calls him again. “Richie, my dear, Lars and I are out for a drink in the bar that used to be Pat’s,” she tells his machine. “You’d better come defend yourself. It’s Mary, by the way, and Lars is steaming mad at you. Says you gave him a life he didn’t lead.”

  When she hangs up, she asks, “What did I do in the story besides sleep with customers? And what do you think? Did he capture my personality?”

  “He put you in bed with Earl,” Lars says. “And for both of us he uses our real names!”

  “What Earl? You don’t mean Earl Earl?”

  “Of course I mean Earl Earl—what other Earl do I know? And if you want to know more, read his fucking book.” He pauses, then says, “Okay, I wasn’t going to tell you, but I brought a copy of it with me.”

  He pulls Richie’s book from the back of his pants and throws it across the table to her. Mary looks at Richie’s jacket photo, then flips through the pages. And when she sees her name she stops to read aloud. “‘Who is the me that I want Earl to see if the me he sees isn’t me?’”

  She glances suspiciously at Lars. “How did he know that? Did you tell him that? By the time I worked for you, I wasn’t still hanging out with Richie, was I?”

  “None of us were. It’s plagiarism, Mary, pure and simple. Remember Jonathan? Remember Andy, the will guy? They’re both talking about taking him to court, and Andy could do it, too, ’cause he’s a judge.”

  “It isn’t plagiarism, you nit, but it sure as hell is license taking. Me in bed with Earl, good Lord!”

  She finds the beginning of the story and reads for a long few minutes in silence. When she stops, her expression is sober. “Was there really such vanity in me back then? Was I as shallow as that, Lars?”

  “All you do in the story is worry about vanity and shallowness,” Lars says. “How can you be vain and shallow while warding those things off?”

  That earns him a smile, and when Lars smiles back, she quite suddenly sees how old he is. Richie looks every bit his age in his author photo, too. She fights the urge to retrieve a compact and check herself out.

  “Those things … those strips you hung from the painting I bought look like dangling socks,” Lars says. “Every time I see them, I think they ought to be matched and folded and put away in drawers.”

  “They do not look like socks. They look like what they’re supposed to look like: everyone’s past failures. It’s just that we usually hang them on the inside, Lars, and I’ve put them out for everyone to see. It’s liberating, don’t you think?”

  She thinks it’s liberating, but Lars is hunched around his beer like a walrus protecting its young. He’s clearly never been liberated by anything in his life, never mind art. Mary wishes she hadn’t asked for the beer. She wants to go to her mother’s house, get started with sorting her mother’s things. Despite herself, she imagines drawers full of mismatched socks.

  “I don’t wear my failures on the inside. I wear them right here on my face,” says Lars. “Do you know what I want on my tombstone, Mary? It’s ‘Here Lies Lars Larson, Three Ex-wives and No Kids.’”

  Mary touches his arm. Was Lars this maudlin when they were barely past being kids themselves?

 
“I need to get back to Mom’s,” she says. “I’ve got a month’s worth of work to do and I’m heading back to Berkeley in a week.”

  She looks at her phone, and when she turns it to show him how late it is, it rings out the theme to The Bridge on the River Kwai. One of her husband’s tricks is to change her ringtone to reflect whatever old movie they have recently seen. It’s hokey, but she loves him for it.

  “That’ll be Bert,” she says, but she sees that it’s Richie. She stands away from Lars. “Hey,” she says. “You’ve got a lot of chutzpah, buddy, putting me in bed with Earl like that. And how come it took you fifty years to write a book?”

  “I’m standing across the street,” Richie says. “I can see you through the window.”

  Mary looks at the window but sees only her reflection looking back.

  “You’re not coming in?”

  “It would be better if you came out. I don’t want to fight with Lars.”

  “Why not? I remember you as one who faced his fears.”

  “Nah,” he says. “You’ve got me confused with someone else.”

  Mary looks at Lars, who is leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head. “Lars told me you were in hospice, Richie; that’s how upset he is by whatever you wrote about him. Why not come in and make things right? We can all get drunk.”

  She looks around the bar. It’s twice the size it used to be and empty of other customers. Quite suddenly she does see Richie out the window, his body growing larger as he darts across the street. When he opens the door, Lars is looking directly at him.

  “He came when you called, Mary,” he says, “just like someone’s dog.”

  “Howdy, Lars,” says Richie.

  When the door swings shut behind him, the stillness of the place banks down. Richie is carrying two copies of his book, one in each of the pockets of his jacket. Mary swears it’s the same jacket that he wore when they worked together fifty years earlier. He comes across the room to give a book to her, then takes the other over to Lars. At first, it seems that Lars won’t move, but then he brings his hands down, takes the book, and opens it to see if there’s an inscription. There is. It says, “To Lars K Larson, the dearest friend of my youth.”

  Opposite the inscription is a drawing of the bar as seen from outside, its windows smoky and with a lot of people standing around inside. Musical notes linger around the words “Pat’s Tavern, Saint Patrick’s Day, 1968.” The drawing takes up most of the page. When Mary comes over to look at it, Lars takes her copy of Richie’s book to see if it also has a drawing. It does not. He has written only “Mary, my dear, you have always been my inspiration.”

  “He stole that one from the Beatles,” Lars says.

  “If my name were Martha, it really would be plagiarism,” Mary tells him.

  Richie goes to the bar to get more beer. While he’s gone, Lars and Mary stare at the drawing in Lars’s book, which, though only pen and ink, is really quite exquisite. Mary thinks it looks like a Hogarth, with herself behind the bar under great thicknesses of hair, and with Richie carrying pitchers of beer in the foreground, his hair somehow made to look green. Between them, Lars is dancing with Immy, the woman who became his first wife. Every bar stool is taken by some man or woman.

  “That’s Jonathan,” says Lars, pointing, “and there’s your old pal Earl.”

  “Earl,” Mary says, “good Lord.”

  “Next to Earl is Ralph, the old gay English teacher, and next to Ralph is the girl with the famous parents.”

  Richie comes back with the beer. “Becky Welles,” he says. “After that night, we all pretty much lost touch. She died a few years back.”

  “So you wrote these stories to talk about how things might have been?” asks Lars. “You imagined peoples lives for them?”

  His expression is hopeful, like that might be something he could understand, though it sounds fairly creepy to Mary. People ought to be allowed to imagine their own lives, at least, she thinks.

  Richie holds his glass up, as if to toast Lars’s acuity, but when the name of the girl with the famous parents finally registers with Mary, words flow out of her unbidden. “Do you think a town can act as a hedge against the unabated loneliness of the human heart?”

  That stumps Lars, but Richie puts his glass to his lips and sips from it, looking into Mary’s eyes over its rim. “We take the roads we take,” he says. “I was only providing alternate routes.”

  In the drawing, there is movement now, with people standing out of booths and getting down off bar stools. They walk over to the bar’s front window, raising their own glasses up. Perhaps they are toasting Mary and Lars and Richie, reflected in the window from fifty years later, or perhaps they are simply getting drunk. But the words one of them utters—“May your life have meaning on the day you die”—express a sentiment each of them would like to embrace but hasn’t yet—would like to embrace but hasn’t because, for the most part, they are entirely too young.

  “So much water under the bridge,” says Richie.

  “So much water under the bridge,” say Mary and Lars.

  When the tavern door opens and a group walks in, Mary decides that she can clear her mother’s house tomorrow, Lars decides to let go of his irritation, and Richie decides that he will try to write another book, maybe a novel. This time, though, he’ll change everyone’s name and not set it in Tacoma. He looks at Lars. “Sorry, Lars,” he says.

  He looks at Mary, but before he can speak, she puts a finger to his lips. “Let me read the other story first,” she says.

  “You’re happy in the next one,” Lars tells her.

  When Mary opens her copy of Richie’s book, Richie says, “You’re going to read it now? Have the decency to wait until I’m gone, at least.”

  But Mary reads the story, one hand up to guard against Richie’s intrusion. He intruded enough in writing the stories, alternative routes or not.

  Lars and Richie watch her. It was that way years ago, too, everyone watching Mary while pretending to do something else. Richie thinks she’s kept her beauty and believes he got her right in his stories. He’s less sure about Lars. Later he’ll have to deal with Jonathan, though he did get a nice note from Andy. A note and a dinner invitation.

  Those who came into the bar a moment earlier are as young as the old friends were when they frequented the place. There are only four of them, three young women and a man, but they order two pitchers of beer and are soon sitting back, drinking and laughing. It makes Lars and Richie smile to see how they once were, but Mary is busy reading and barely looks up.

  Until blaring music comes on.

  It’s entirely too loud for them, so they decide to finish their own night of drinking somewhere else.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS, as always, to my wife, Virginia Wiley, my first and most trusted reader, for putting up with draft after draft of these stories. Also, thanks to Erika Goldman, my editor and publisher at Bellevue Literary Press, for understanding that the specific order of these stories is of significant importance, and for reading my collection’s most troublesome story many times. Thanks to Elana Rosenthal, also of Bellevue Literary Press, for her openness and her attention to detail.

  In Tacoma, thanks to my old friend, Denny Hall, for helping me remember the band name Blueport News, as well as many other details of a now distant past; to all of those who grew up with me at Brown’s Point and who might think they find their childhood homes, youthful shenanigans, and even some of their names represented in these stories; and to those who haunted Pat’s Tavern in the winter and spring of 1967.

  Thanks to Arches Magazine for publishing “Your Life Should Have Meaning on the Day You Die,” the story that gave me the idea for this collection, and also for publishing the obituary of Becky Welles, thus reminding me of her calm goodness in the face of all the ravages of fame.

  Lastly, thanks to my friends, colleagues, and wonderful graduate students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, both in the Engl
ish department and at Black Mountain Institute, for supporting my work over the course of many years.

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