Now she was at a bar a few blocks away with this man, the one who had picked her up off the ground. He had sandy hair, a buzz cut, and he was a little taller than her, and sort of broad and muscular, as if he had been lifting things his entire life, but he also had a slight middle-aged gut, the kind that comes with indulgence and pleasure. He was from South Carolina—already she had forgotten which city, and it was too late to ask him again—in town for an ophthalmology convention.
“Really, it’s just an excuse to visit my favorite city in the world,” he said. His eyes were blue, and he was tanned, she was to find out, from all the work he was doing on a house he had recently bought, exterior work, some of it, but also gardening. He loved his tomatoes, which he claimed were exceptionally juicy. He had nice hands. And he wore stylish glasses, horn-rims, modern and angular, but the rest of him was plain and simple. “And this is my favorite bar in the world,” he said. He slapped the counter. He told her that a bar named for a woman is a bar you can trust, or something like that, she barely heard it. By then she was distracted by her phone, which was ringing. At last. It was Gary.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I have to take this call. It’s very important. But I would like you to stay right there, if you could, and drink that drink, and I’ll be done in a minute. It’s my brother, it’s a family matter, and I need to speak to him. But when I’m done talking to him, I want to come back here, right here, and I would like to flirt with you, if that’s OK.”
He said, “That’ll be fine with me.”
“Just stay right there,” she said, and wandered outside, phone to her ear.
“Gary,” she said. “Where are you?”
“I’m in LA.”
“Dad’s dying,” she said. “Like almost dead now.”
“I know.”
“Then why aren’t you here?”
She heard a rustling noise on his end, and then he took a long sip of something. Finally he said, “I’m sitting this one out.”
“What are you talking about? You don’t have to do anything. You just show up and he dies and it’s over. He’ll probably be dead by the time you get here.”
He laughed.
“I’m not trying to be funny about this,” she said.
“Look, I’m not interested in participating in this particular family event,” he said. “I’m out on this one. Let me know how it goes.”
Is he even allowed to do that? Ridiculous, she thought.
“I do everything I’m supposed to do,” he said. “I’ve done it all. I’m a great father and I have been a good son, given more than they have ever deserved from me, considering everything.”
Up the block she saw the man who had been fighting earlier with his girlfriend or wife or whatever. He was tottering slowly toward her.
“It’s true, you’ve been an upright human being.”
“I don’t see you having them over for Thanksgiving,” Gary said.
“Hey.”
“I’m not criticizing you. This is just to show you, I have done my duties.”
The man finally reached her, and he started to say something unintelligible, a finger pointed at her chest. This joker.
“Can you hold on a second, Gary? Don’t hang up. Hold on.” She held the phone to her chest and glared at the man, an ice-cold glare, and said, “If you don’t get away from me right now, I will fuck you up, little man.” He shut his mouth and wandered off.
She returned to the phone. “Gary. Please come.”
“Listen. It is enough. I didn’t like him, I didn’t love him, and I can’t fake it. I fake so much”—his voice cracked—“but this, I cannot.”
Her mother had made her do that big dramatic goodbye in the hospital, and now he won’t even show up? She felt conned and cheated and jealous that she hadn’t thought not to show up first. But still, should she have to do this alone?
“It feels unfair that it’s all on me,” Alex said.
“Do you remember when Nana died?” he said. She knew immediately what he was talking about, the trauma on the day of the funeral, when the two of them had been devastated because Anya was the person who had loved them most, taught them how to be who they were now, or at least the good parts of them, and they were genuinely mourning the loss of a gentle and giving human being. Their tears and emotions had enraged their father, and he had yelled at them and sent them to their rooms even though they were adults already, and Alex had gotten under the covers and sobbed because she didn’t feel there was any love left in the world for her, and she had always believed that Gary had done the same. But this was not the case.
“Dad came into my room—I was lying down—and he sat next to me in bed,” Gary said. “Then he put his hand around my neck, totally catching me off guard, because if I had been standing, it would have been a fair fight and I could have taken him.”
“I believe you,” said Alex.
“And he squeezed me, you know, pretty tight, and told me to keep my shit together and to stop being a baby and some other garbage, and I didn’t pass out, but it was close.”
“I didn’t know this happened.”
“You knew like half the stuff that went on. He left you alone mostly.”
“He did. I know he did.” This choked her up, and she felt a hot tear, and a vague sense of arousal, which confused her. To be someone’s favorite was a priceless thing. But to be his favorite? She felt a little whorish.
“Anyway, I’ve been thinking about that day a lot since I heard he had the heart attack, and maybe I’ve been thinking about it every day since it happened, if I’m going to be real with myself.” He took another swig of whatever was getting him through the night. “How he didn’t want me to mourn. And so, I have decided not to mourn him.”
She felt her spine collapse slightly.
“I promise I’ll be around for Mom,” Gary said.
“That is not a one-to-one swap.”
“I’m sorry, it’s all I’ve got. I’m out.”
She felt desperate. “Gary, if you come back, maybe she’ll tell us all about him. Like all the terrible things he’s done. Like why she stayed with him. Like why the fuck they moved to New Orleans. Like everything.”
“I don’t need to know that information.”
“But if you know the truth—”
“It won’t make you feel better.”
“But—”
“It might make you feel worse.”
“If I know why they are the way they are, then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am,” she said.
“What more do you want to know?” said Gary. “Dad was a criminal.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And he probably cheated on Barbra,” said Gary.
“Yes.”
“And he hit her, and he hit me, and he hit you.”
“Yes.”
“What other information do you need? What great secret will be revealed?”
“I want to know why she still loved him.”
“You want to know why you still loved him.”
“Yes.”
“And if you’re like him, somehow. I worry about this, too.”
She groaned. She was so sick of herself.
“Alex, honey, you’re nothing like him. I know you. My sister, my friend. You’re not as bad as you think you are—you’re not bad at all. You’re a good person, I promise you. I know you. You’re good. Don’t worry about him anymore. You need to let yourself forget he ever existed. Because that’s what I plan on doing.”
She leaned against the crumbling brick wall outside the bar, tapped her head against it a few times, accepted its dust upon her.
“I am telling you, you don’t want to know.” He said this last part rather forcefully.
Then they said they loved each other, and they bid each other goodbye. She wouldn’t see him for another year, which she didn’t know then. His life was about to shift. He would get busy. Things would be complicated. And when she did see him, he would be pale and thin and ol
der and sadder and brokenhearted and lonely, yet also more successful than he’d ever been in his career, and she would tell him that he was good, too, and that he was worth loving, because by then she’d be the strong one, she’d be the one who could offer some hope, and he wouldn’t believe her then like she believed him now, because sometimes love only works one way. But at least it worked at the time.
Back in the bar, one more cocktail, and she was a drunken goon, but he didn’t seem to mind, this man. His name was Rich. Sometimes he went hunting.
“Whatever we do tonight, let’s not talk about politics,” she said.
“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” Rich said.
“This is a real milestone for me,” she said.
“What is?”
But she was already off on the next topic, in this case his eyes—were they always so blue? By now the sun had set, and the streets were clear and quiet, tourists napping off their day in their hotel rooms, while the service industry night shift had already arrived to work. But they had nowhere to be, Rich and Alex, except right there, with each other. They decided to take a walk down to the water. He held her hand, and in that comfort of the flesh she remembered everything—why she was in New Orleans, her father, her mother, her brother, her daughter—and she instantly went to her phone, which hadn’t been charged in hours, and was, of course, dead. She panicked.
“I think I need to go charge this right away. Like right now,” she said.
They were standing on a short pier at the water’s edge. A riverboat, its decks packed with people clutching plastic to-go cups, emerged from the darkness and slowly pulled up to one of the docks. Someone on board cheered.
“What do you need that phone for?” he said. “We’re here. Let’s live in the moment.” He put an arm around her waist.
“You’re right,” she said. “I should just throw it in the Mississippi.”
“No, don’t do that. Those things are expensive.”
“You’re so smart.” She kissed him, and he kissed her—to do this in public felt extravagant and sexy; how had she not known this all along?—and he dipped her back a little and she laughed.
When she tells this story later to her old college roommate Kimberly (a long-term adjunct at Northwestern, a school that was never going to give her what she needed, that being a full-time job, and who was currently recovering from a recent breakup with a long-term boyfriend who was never going to give her what she desired, which was a husband), whom she had recently reconnected with via Facebook in an attempt to expand her social horizons upon her return to Chicago from New Orleans, Rich will be taller, and he will be younger, but she will not have to lie about his cock, the length of which she demonstrates by placing one fist sideways on top of the other and saying, “Give or take.” (Cock size was a thing she hadn’t talked about since college, now that she thought about it. Who discusses such things when they get older? Who has the leisure time?) He will be a full partner at the ophthalmology office in the story she tells; there will be no pain-in-the-ass boss, as there is in reality to complicate the narrative; but his commitment to pleasing her orally will be highlighted, and that part is also not a lie. Kimberly will nod enthusiastically, the only appropriate response in this scenario.
Alex will also not mention that she felt a moment of completely neutral calm as he went down on her, when she turned her head and glanced out the hotel window at the small metal furniture set on the balcony, and then things went blank, and the world disappeared around her. She will not mention that part, because for whatever reason it felt more intimate than the rest of what they did together, and because that wasn’t Kimberly’s concern, how she felt when she came. And also, it implied, in contrast, an unhappiness in the rest of her life. And she was resolved not to ruin this new opportunity for friendship by complaining about all her existential crises, at least not at first. So it was highlights only for Kimberly. “When he kissed me, it felt like the world stopped for a second, and we were all alone on the river,” she said.
And that part wasn’t a lie either. Right then, feeling the breeze off the Mississippi, and the small illusion of privacy they felt under the roof of the pier, her phone did not matter, her family did not matter, that man running the country did not matter. What was politics and family when this lighthearted, barrel-chested man was delicately nibbling her ear, with two hands planted firmly on her ass, going for gold?
“Damn, girl,” he said as he fondled her. “You’ve been working out.”
I don’t work out for you, she thought. I work out for me, for fitness and for health, so I can live a long life, and so I can have enough energy to be a single mom and work hard at my job, so I can pay my bills and keep my spirits steady in this unsteady era.
Out loud, she said flirtatiously, “I try.”
They held hands again as they walked back to his hotel, and goddamn, it was so nice to be touched, and she even felt a little greedy about it. I will never see you again, she thought. Give me everything you have. They stopped on street corners to kiss. They were messy, and they were sweet to each other. By the time they got to his hotel room on the edge of the Quarter, they collapsed, unquestioningly, into bed. Like obviously this was going to be the thing they were going to do, no negotiations necessary. She had fully forgotten about her phone; she left it, dead, for the night. Which is how she missed the phone call from the hospital telling her that her father was dead.
21
A new shift of nurses had arrived, Barbra noticed, and they were engaging in a polite bit of chatter. They all looked unfamiliar, and she had a sudden wave of feeling completely disconnected from where she was. How did she get to this hospital? How had she arrived at this exact location? The space was shrinking in front of her, but she kept walking. The paintings were throbbing, breathing ribbons of purple and green and gold. She could have been high above ground or beneath the earth. She wouldn’t reach the end until he did.
* * *
It had been his idea, not hers, to move to New Orleans, after everything had gone to shit.
One Thanksgiving family dinner at their son’s house in Algiers, where everyone seemed to get along, Victor had decided that was it, they could be a family again. The past would be forgotten. Not dealt with in any way. Just forgotten. “Can you believe this weather?” he said. And she admitted it was nice to have a warm Thanksgiving, although she suspected the summers would be a burden. And their granddaughter Avery seemed well mannered and interesting and smart, he insisted, words she found somewhat hard to believe coming from his mouth. Real estate was cheap, he said, and that she knew to be true. The city seemed to be fully recovered from the storm. Victor identified with the struggle of building something out of wreckage. Maybe there were opportunities there, he said.
He was fooling himself, she thought. He’d never work again. He’d been ejected from the system. Barbra shrugged. “Or maybe we’ll just grow old and die there,” she said.
“That, too,” he said.
To their family, they said they wanted change. But they knew they were in hiding. “We’ll start over. No one cares who we are down there,” he said. They hadn’t disappointed anyone yet. She hoped they wouldn’t live long enough to ruin anything else.
“Are you sure? It gets hot there,” said Barbra. “You hate to sweat.”
“That’s what air conditioning is for,” he said.
She didn’t like to fight.
And didn’t they have a nice time when he took her to see jazz in the lobby of the Four Seasons? Didn’t it feel as sophisticated as their dates in the city? Nothing, but nothing, would replace Manhattan in her eyes, but she could see how there was a cool elegance to New Orleans, that it wasn’t just sweating and boozing and eating fried food and bawdy, loud tourists, all of them wearing shorts. He took her to a restaurant uptown, and they sat in a big, glass-encased room, trees and light all around, the waitstaff in crisp formal attire, dramatically serving them beautifully plated food—too heavy for her to eat, but
then again, everything was too heavy for her to eat—and all of the other details delighted her, so that was enough. And there were antique shops. Long streets of antique shops in the French Quarter, and uptown, too. He even went with her one day, though she would have preferred to shop by herself. This seemed like a promise he was making, of a different kind of life than the one they had known. That appealed to her, that they would spend time together. She was furious with him, and mortified by everything he had done, and yet . . . she hadn’t been surprised, in the end, and she had been with him for so long, and now at last she would have him all to herself. Or so she thought.
They found their condo, they packed, they moved, they unpacked. She spent days nudging their furniture and art around the space, but there was only so much she could do to make things fit. The apartment was freshly renovated, and the handsome, dark-stained wood floors were a comfort to her, but there was no light: trees darkened their windows. We’re trapped, she thought daily. At least the ceilings were high, at least there was some air. Still, she’d pared everything down to the bare minimum, and it didn’t matter. There were only five rooms, nine hundred square feet. If he hadn’t had that heart attack, one of them might have eventually murdered the other, she thought. They’d gone from five thousand square feet to a pittance. Once they were rich, and now, as far as she was concerned, they were poor. For when all the math was done, it was clear: they were on a fixed income for the rest of their lives. No extravagant vacations, no more jewelry, one home, and that’s it. Just the two of them, making ends meet.
But now, would he at last stop sleeping around with other women? Her favorite antique clocks hung in a row on one wall of their new home. If he knew what time it was, maybe he’d show up for her, for once. Order, a system; surely he’d fall into line. He didn’t have enough money left to throw at women, to spoil someone, impress them, and he was aging fast, she saw it. Could she at last allow herself to trust him? Could they retire quietly into the night?
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