B008J4PNHE EBOK

by Owen King

  In retirement, Jo-Jo had taken a position providing studio commentary for Yankee broadcasts. His speech retained a faint Anglo-German accent that lent his insights a canny ring that people apparently liked; Sam thought he sounded like the Artful Dodger blended with a smidgen of Terminator. In the receiving line at his wedding to Polly, he had hauled Sam into a crushing embrace and tearfully proclaimed, “Nothing but love today, dude, yah?” The retired catcher also held an interest in a chain of used-car lots for which he was featured in an annoying series of television commercials.

  None of that impressed Sam, however, who wasn’t a sports fan. (Though he knew enough to consider the Yankees objectionable on principle. Talk of the so-called Yankee Way had, to Sam’s ear, a fundamentalist ring—like maybe it wasn’t the Yankee Way to perform oral sex, or to wear the color yellow during the month of January, or something like that.)

  What did garner his respect were Jo-Jo’s thighs. They were immense; they had the hard cylindrical shape of watermelons, the freakish kind that won prizes at fairs. It was these living pylons that had given him the power to repel other steroidal men from home plate. Jo-Jo’s thighs looked constructed, coopered, like casks.

  Although the man had never treated Sam with anything less than cheerful goodwill, Sam feared—quite reasonably, considering the sordid acts he had engaged in, and continued to engage in, with Jo-Jo’s wife—that Jo-Jo would find out what was going on and kill him, boa constrictor–style, with his terrible thighs. There could be no ghastlier fate than to be scissored to death between those ham hocks.

  Polly had met Jo-Jo when he came to visit the first-grade class that she had been teaching at a charter school in Fort Greene. She told Sam that it was seeing Jo-Jo squished down at the tiny art table, and hearing him interact with a five-year-old named Cricket, that had won her heart. “We’re gonna need some of that blue paper there and a white crayon, yah?” Jo-Jo had informed Cricket, and spent a half hour painstakingly instructing the child in the art of drawing the interlocking N and Y of the Yankees’ symbol. It didn’t seem to matter that Jo-Jo displayed zero interest in the things that Polly liked aside from sports—novels, music, fashion, or gossip. Nor did it seem to make any difference that she continued to like sleeping with Sam.

  She claimed they were in love, she and Jo-Jo, and maybe they were. Love could be fraught and bizarre, and there were always secrets, arrangements of which no one else was aware. All you had to do was think about anyone’s parents. The affair Polly was conducting didn’t, Sam had to concede, rule out some kind of successful, loving marriage. Who knew how it was behind closed doors, what actually went on between Polly and her husband and her husband’s thighs.

  “Why are you so concerned with a wife I don’t have?” asked Sam.

  “Because you’re intent on spoiling her wedding by being a jaded poop about everything.” Polly moaned. He heard her stomp her feet under the table. “You are so frustrating. I don’t understand how you can hate weddings.”

  “Because they’re my job,” he said. “And I never said that. I said they were dull and tiresome, and if something awful happened, it would be more interesting to film.”

  “But you need to have one, Sam. Don’t you see? Your wedding is like the birthday party for the rest of your life.” Polly’s voice had grown small. She sounded the way people sound when they have at last accepted that a beloved and irreplaceable possession—a photo, an earring, the cat—is not going to turn up after all.

  What Polly failed to comprehend was that weddings were just one of the many, many things that bored and irritated him these days. He had suffered a great loss, and he could be sour, but with the exception of thoughts about Booth, Sam rarely engaged in conscious negativity. He didn’t have the energy.

  Sam tried to switch subjects; he asked if Jo-Jo really liked him. Polly said yes, but who cared, Sam was her friend. There followed a silence then, which Polly didn’t usually permit. It meant she was actually mad.

  Rainer released a sudden burble of outrage and kicked his baby shoes. “I understand exactly how you feel, sweetheart,” Polly said. “Uncle Sam can be an unbelievable pisser.”

  The bearded vagrant was gazing in their direction. He gave an exaggerated blink, squeezing his eyes shut tight, then opening them wide. It was the action of a child calling on all his reserves of courage before throwing open a closet door. The man raised a pale, shaking hand. His curly hair and long beard streamed left in another burst of wind.

  It was a greeting to some ghost, Sam inferred, and in its tentativeness there was also a feeble plea. For what, Sam couldn’t guess. He had to count himself lucky there.

  “What are we doing?” Sam asked abruptly. What he meant was: let’s stop meeting in secret, having sex, messing with your marriage, messing with your kid’s life; it’s not fun anymore.

  “Don’t start.” Polly rose and began snatching up her things and stuffing them in her bag. It was time to go to see her shrink, she announced; her tits ached, summer had crapped out on them without so much as a fare-thee-well and, she finished, thanks to him, for days to come she would be ruminating on Pompeii, thinking about people being boiled alive in lava and turned into statues, because that was just how her mind worked.

  He stood and put out his arms. Polly hugged him hard, as if she wanted to crack something, then let go, hoisted Rainer’s seat, and departed without a backward glance. Sam sat and watched her go.

  Polly turned right, lugging Rainer’s seat, her free hand lifted to hail a taxi, and passed beyond Sam’s sight.

  The vagrant staggered off in the other direction, waving his arms around as if trying to ward off a cloud of midges. Then the vagrant was gone, too. Sam wondered what it was like to live like that, pestered by phantoms, at mortal odds with your own head.

  Sam took a sip of cooling, clotting chocolate and somehow managed to swallow it.

  ■ ■ ■

  Only here, now, on this random Thursday night in September, at the nuptials of two middle-aged academics, as the weddingographer filmed from his spot between the balcony newels, an elderly man in academic robes shuffled up the aisle to take a place between the spouses-to-be. This elderly man was the officiant. The program bestowed upon him the title Poet. That was different.

  For the occasion, the poet had donned academic robes, silvery at the seams from decades of use. He stooped, craning his neck to gaze at the audience from the pit between his shoulders. The tight white curls of his hair appeared yellowed at the tips, a detail that suggested a life gone marvelously beyond ripe. His voice was piping.

  The poet began by telling the assembled, the family and friends of these two middle-aged professors, “So, here we are on the last night of summer. The last night of summer. I thought it would never end. Never end. Well, I guess we’ll just have to see what this new season has to offer. This new season.” Before continuing, the poet glanced meaningfully at the husband-to-be, then at the wife-to-be. “The woman I loved has been dead for six years now. I think of her each day. Each day. She was a beauty and a wit and a friend. To have known her was, and remains, my greatest blessing. She is here still. Still . . .

  “She is. Literally. Literally. I still find her detritus around the apartment. Lena was a woman of innumerable qualities, but few if any of them were better developed than her general scabrousness. Only the other day I discovered that she had left me a used Band-Aid on page 121 of our Collected Larkin.” The elderly gentleman rolled his eyes and wagged his head. “Thank you very much, Lena.”

  The crowd laughed.

  Sam narrowed the aperture of the lens, carving off the bride and groom, and it was as though the man were speaking to him alone, the eye in the balcony.

  “But look at this here—” The poet lifted a finger. There was a Band-Aid on the ring finger. “Look at this here . . . Love is not easy. You carry it around with you forever.” He placed his hands on the shoulders of the bride and groom. “It is the most glorious encumbrance a human being can shoulder. But
it is not light. No, it is not light . . .”

  The poet winked at the groom. He turned to the bride and leaned in to whisper something private in her ear. She giggled.

  With that, the elderly gentleman once again addressed the audience, to ask forebearance for a few lines of verse. Not his own, he said, he was letting them off for good behavior. It was a poem by Jack Gilbert called “A Brief for the Defense”:

  “Sorrow everywhere,” it began. There followed a series of juxtapositions between hunger and beauty, sickness and laughter. This gave the basis for an argument about joy, about the necessity for it, the duty of each person to accept it. To refuse joy was an immoral act and an insult to humanity. The elderly gentleman recited with his eyes closed. At the end of each line, his withered voice rose, as plangent as wind through a crack in the wall:

  . . . We must have

  the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

  furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

  measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

  An involuntary tension locked Sam’s hand on the lens hood. At the neck of the camera, the plastic coupling mewled.

  The poem concluded with the sound of oars pulling through still water.

  The old man coughed. “Okay, that’s it. We love you guys. It’s going to be a great fall. Get up here, Reverend. Take us home. Take us home. The fondue’s getting cold.”

  ■ ■ ■

  As the new husband and wife retraced the aisle, the ovation that followed them seemed too loud to Sam’s ears, as though it were coming from somewhere inside himself instead of out. The figures in his lens started to bob and slide, but he managed to film through the blessing and the vows.

  The cocktail hour commenced.

  Sam dragged himself up by the railing. His legs wobbled, and he bumped into someone. His chest felt swollen. Gray specks drizzled across his vision. Liquid splashed his shoulder, and something hit his shoe.

  “Hey.” A young woman in a purple halter dress was beside him, holding a now empty cocktail glass. She was short and wore her dark hair pulled into a pair of stubby hornlike ponytails. A tiny pink diamond clung to her right nostril; scratches of light bent and smeared from the stone and across her face; he was tipping, about to fall.

  Fingers lightly touched his elbow. “You’re forgetting to breathe,” said the woman.

  Sam exhaled. He tightened his grip on the railing and focused on the floor. The rain on the surface of his vision faded away. There was a green olive on the toe of his right shoe, resting at the tip of a wave in the stitching.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m sorry about”—he meant to say her drink, he was sorry about her drink, but he was looking at his shoe—“your olive,” Sam finished.

  The young woman told him to forget it. “Really, are you sure you’re okay?”

  He bent gingerly, picked the olive off his shoe, handed it to her—“Uh, thanks,” she said—he apologized again, and strode across the balcony, descended one set of stairs to the ground floor, another set to the basement, and finally made it to the men’s lavatory.

  On the marble sink counter, Sam put down his camera. The violin strains of the first song of the cocktail hour leaked under the door. One of the faucets was dripping. He leaned against the marble and breathed. The ruthless furnace of this world. The words were fluttering in his head, held there in some mental updraft. Sam repeated the line quietly, letting the words slip off his dry lips.

  Poetry had never meant much to him. He didn’t read it, hadn’t known anyone since college who did. (At Russell, there had been three or four gloomy, bilious girls who huddled in the Shakespeare garden in their hairy black pea coats, ostentatiously taking turns reading aloud from The Norton Anthology of Poetry. He remembered how furiously they had smoked and the stink eye they’d shoot at anyone who came too close.) Nevertheless, the meaning of the line was clear enough: the world caught you, the world caught everyone in the end, and the world was a fire. Sam felt that he knew that as well as anyone.

  The bathroom door creaked open. A man entered and went to a urinal. He finished pissing, he zipped his fly, and he left without washing his hands. In the mirror, Sam saw the man shoot him a suspicious glance before he pushed out the door, and that was when the wedding-ographer realized he was visibly shuddering all over, his hands opening and closing at his sides, his legs shivering inside his trousers, his teeth chattering, the clacking in his skull like someone stabbing a single typewriter key over and over again.

  2.

  After a few minutes Sam was able to gather himself and return to the reception. Over the next hour, he worked the room, recording the guests as unobtrusively as possible while they mingled and chatted and helped themselves to the hors d’oeuvres and the open bar.

  Toward the end of the cocktail hour, one attendee, a burly man in a glaring maroon suit, toasted the good fortune of the newlyweds by beginning to bellow “La Marseillaise.” Several others soon joined in. Someone helped the poet up onto a banquet table, where he danced, rigidly, and flapped his skinny elbows like a taunting child. Another part of the room began to sing “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” An old woman removed her flats and clapped the soles together in an aggressive way. The bride, who was singing with the “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” people, lifted the hem of her gown and flashed some thigh at the people singing “La Marseillaise.” The groom climbed atop the table where the poet was dancing. He fed the poet a shrimp, and the poet pretended to be a seal. A waiter, a bona fide Frenchman, cast down his platter of stuffed mushrooms, tore off his tie, and threw his arm around the bearded man, joining in with “La Marseillaise.” A child had obtained an ice bucket; a miniature flapper of a girl wearing a sequined headband and pink shoes, she began to wander around, swinging the bucket, carefully seeding the floor with ice cubes.

  Sam rushed around, weaving between tables and chairs, tracking singing faces, focusing on the banging soles, capturing the deliberate, tottering walk of the girl with the bucket as she moved through the tumult, cubes falling in her wake.

  The poet started to choke on a shrimp. The groom performed the Heimlich maneuver, and the old man coughed up the bit of shellfish onto a woman’s perm. There was a shriek as someone’s aunt stepped on an ice cube and went down with a kick and a thump on the hardwood. The singing petered out, to scattered applause. Dinner was served.

  Sam stowed his camera behind the bar for a fifteen-minute break and hunkered in a corner near the open bar to eat a dinner roll and sip a Maker’s Mark. His phone vibrated—a text message from Mina:

  Salutations, ex-friend. I’m coming over for the night. Her needs space from her mother.

  Recently, his relationship with his sister had become fraught. There had been an inappropriate boyfriend situation, Sam had intervened, and the last they’d spoken, about a week ago, she’d told him to die. Mina was the one person who, over the last few years, had maintained the power to sometimes make Sam do things he didn’t want to. In this area, though, her effort to make him feel guilty had failed utterly—she was seventeen, and he was right.

  Sam typed back,

  What is the magic word?

  “Girlfriend?” The young woman in the purple dress with the ponytails and the nose ring was leaning over Sam, reading his cell screen.

  “Kid sister.”

  Mina’s reply popped on the screen:

  Rosebud, you fucking asshole.

  “Oh, I like her,” said the woman.

  “Yeah,” said Sam, “she’s great.” He wrote to Mina that he’d be home around eleven or so, set his phone aside.

  “So I guess you must go to a lot of weddings,” she said.

  “Yeah. Most every weekend.”

  “Wow. How miserable are you?”

  “I’ve considered climbing a clock tower a few times.” He reached up to shake her hand. “Sam.”

  “Tess,” said the young woman. “We met when you were about to pass out.”
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  He took a bite of his roll. “I think I had a panic attack.”

  “Seriously?” Tess’s fists were planted on her hips, and she spoke with a flat, slightly nasal affect. It was easy to imagine her demanding his lunch money, easy to imagine handing it over. Sam found this attractive.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m not sure why.” He wasn’t about to get into it with a stranger. The litany of his life’s incinerations was, at the very least, second-date material.

  “Well, you seem okay now. Maybe it was that grim fucking poem. ‘Congratulations on your marriage, and no pressure, but if you don’t enjoy it, you’re letting down the rest of the world, which, by the way, is a cesspool.’ Hold on a sec.”

  She stepped away to the bar, and he heard her order a vodka tonic. When she returned, he was finished with his roll and put up his hand for a lift. She obliged and he stood. Tess had a small, cold hand, no rings.

  Sam brushed a few crumbs from his trousers. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie—dull but all-purpose.

  “Are you always so sensitive, Sam? For instance, do you cry often?”

  “Would there be something wrong with that? If I cried often?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I don’t cry often. Outside of, you know, people I know dying, or extreme pain. I’ve always thought of myself as being fairly stoic. I didn’t cry when the Towers fell. I just sat there and watched and ate crackers all day. Froze me.”

  “I didn’t cry, either, not that day, anyway. I cried when I saw Dan Rather crying on Letterman. That broke my heart.”

  “I saw that. I don’t know if it made me cry, but it was definitely disconcerting. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “Because Dan Rather’s so old and earnest and wacky. You don’t want to see someone like that crying. It made him so real and normal.” She drank from her tumbler, sucked on an ice cube, let it clink back in the glass. “How about movies? Do you cry at movies?”