On another night, Rachel might have felt a twinge of jealousy or at least competitive edge—the woman had just given fucking birth, for Christ’s sake, and she looked ready for the center spread in a lingerie catalogue—but tonight she knew how good she looked. Not in an advertising-of-the-wares way. But in an elegant, understated way that told everyone in the room she didn’t feel any need to trumpet what God had placed in good proportion in the first place and which genetics—and Pilates—were leaving, thus far, in place.
She and Haya caught up by the bar at one point as AB slept in the car seat at her mother’s feet. Because of the language barrier, they’d rarely spoken other than a few passing hellos and had hardly seen each other in a year, but Caleb had said Haya’s grasp of English was vastly improved. Rachel decided to brave the waters and found that he hadn’t been exaggerating: Haya now spoke well, if deliberately.
“How are you?”
“I am . . . happy. How are you?”
“Great. How’s Annabelle?”
“She is . . . fussy.”
Rachel glanced down at the child sleeping in her seat in the middle of a party. Earlier, while she’d been on Haya’s hip, she’d never once squawked or even squirmed.
Haya stared back at Rachel, her beautiful face a blank, her lips set.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Rachel said eventually.
“Yes. He . . . is my husband.”
“That’s why you came?” Rachel felt a small smile tug her lips. “Because he’s your husband?”
“Yes.” Haya’s eyes narrowed in confusion. It made Rachel feel guilty, as if she were bullying the woman over language and cultural barriers. “You look . . . very beautiful, Rachel.”
“Thank you. So do you.”
Haya looked at the baby at her feet. “She is . . . waking.”
Rachel had no idea how she predicted it, but about five seconds later, Annabelle’s eyes popped open.
Rachel squatted by her. She never knew what to say to babies. She’d watched people over the years interact with them in a way she found unnatural—jabbering in that infantile tone of voice no one ever adopted unless they were talking to babies, animals, or the very old and infirm.
“Hello,” she said to Annabelle.
The child stared back at her with her mother’s eyes—so clear and untainted by skepticism or irony that Rachel couldn’t help but feel judged by them.
She placed one finger on Annabelle’s chest and the child closed her hand around it and tugged.
“You’ve got a strong grip,” Rachel said.
Annabelle let go of her finger and looked up at the cowl of her car seat with a hint of distress, as if she were surprised to find it there. Her face crumpled and Rachel only had time to say, “No, no,” before Annabelle wailed.
Haya’s shoulder brushed Rachel’s as she reached for the handle of the car seat. She lifted the seat up onto the bar. She rocked the seat back and forth and the baby immediately stopped crying and Rachel felt embarrassed and incompetent.
“You have a gift with her,” she said.
“I am . . . her mother.” Again Haya looked a bit confused. “She is tired. Hungry.”
“Of course,” Rachel said because it seemed to be the kind of thing one said.
“We must go. Thank you for . . . asking us to your . . . party.”
Haya lifted her daughter from the seat and held her to her shoulder, the baby’s cheek pressed to the side of her neck. Both mother and daughter looked of a piece, as if they shared the same lungs, saw through the same eyes. It made Rachel and her party seem frivolous. And a little sad.
Caleb came over to gather the car seat and pink baby bag and white muslin blanket, then he walked his wife and daughter out to the car and kissed them both good night. Rachel watched them through the window and knew she didn’t want what they had. On the other hand, she knew that she did.
“Look at you,” Brian said when someone—Rachel suspected Melissa—put a dollar in the jukebox and pressed B17, “Since I Fell for You,” and they were compelled to dance to it a second time that night. He raised his eyebrows at their reflection in the full-length mirror on the back wall, and she saw herself head-on. She was surprised, as she always was in the very first millisecond of seeing herself, that she was no longer twenty-three. Someone had once told her that everyone had a fixed age in their mind’s-eye image of themselves. For some it was fifteen or fifty, but everyone had one. Rachel’s was twenty-three. Her face had, of course, grown longer and more lined in the ensuing fourteen years. Her eyes had changed—not the gray-green of them—but they were less sure and less adrenalized. Her hair, so dark a shade of cherry it looked black in most lights, was cut short with a side bang, a look that softened the harder curves of her heart-shaped face.
Or so a producer had once told her when he convinced her to not only cut her hair but straighten it. Before that conversation, it had always been a long tangle that fell to her shoulders. But the producer, after prefacing his critique with “No offense,” words that always preceded something offensive, told her, “You’re a few steps short of beautiful but the camera doesn’t know that. The camera loves you. And that’s making our bosses love you.”
That producer was, of course, Sebastian. She thought so much of herself that she married him.
As she and Brian swayed on the dance floor, she acknowledged what a huge improvement he was over Sebastian. A step up in every way—better-looking, kinder, better conversationalist, funnier, and smarter, even though he tried to downplay that part of his makeup, whereas Sebastian always played it up.
But there was the issue of trust again. Say what you would about Sebastian being an asshole, but he was a genuine asshole. Such an asshole that he didn’t think he had to hide the fact. Sebastian didn’t hide anything.
On the other hand, with Brian, she didn’t know what she had lately. Things had been unnervingly polite between them since he’d returned from his trip. She had nothing to support her mistrust, so she didn’t press the issue. And he seemed fine with that. And yet they moved around each other in the apartment like they were circling a jar of anthrax. They pulled up short in conversations lest they say something that could lead to conflict—his habit of leaving yesterday’s clothes hanging over the bedpost, her predilection for not changing the toilet paper roll if there was still one square left stuck to the cardboard—and chose their words with ultimate care. Soon they’d stop discussing potential spots of tension altogether, which would only lead to resentment. They smiled distantly at each other in the morning, smiled distantly at each other in the evening. Spent more time on their laptops or their cells. In the past week, they’d made love once and it was the carnal version of their distant smiles—as binding as water, as intimate as junk mail.
When the song ended, the group clapped and a few whistled and Melissa tapped a fork into her wineglass and shouted, “Kiss! Kiss!” until they finally obliged.
“How self-conscious do you feel right now?” she asked Brian as she leaned back in his arms.
Brian didn’t reply. He was trying to make sense of something behind her.
She turned as his fingers parted and she stepped out of his grip.
A man had entered the room. He was in his early fifties, with long gray hair tied back in a ponytail. Quite skinny. He wore a gray unstructured sport coat over a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt and dark jeans. His skin was leathery and tan. His blue eyes were so bright they looked aflame.
“Brian!” He opened his arms.
Brian exchanged a quick glance with Caleb—it was so fast that if Rachel hadn’t been standing three inches from his face she would have missed it—and then a smile flooded his face and he approached the man.
“Andrew.” He grasped the man behind his elbow with one hand while shaking his hand with the other. “What brings you to Boston?”
“A show at the Lyric.” Andrew raised his eyebrows.
“That’s great.”
“It is?”
/> “Isn’t it?”
Andrew shrugged. “It’s a job.”
Caleb walked a pair of drinks over. “Andrew Gattis, back in da house. Stoli still your poison?”
Andrew drained the drink in one swallow and handed the glass back to Caleb. He took the second drink from him, nodded his thanks, and took a moderate sip. “Good to see you.”
“You too.”
Andrew chuckled. “It is?”
Caleb laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “That seems to be your line tonight.”
“Andrew, my wife, Rachel.”
Rachel shook Andrew Gattis’s hand. It was surprisingly smooth, even delicate.
“A pleasure, Rachel.” He gave her a knowing, reckless smile. “You’re smart.”
She laughed. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re smart.” He was still shaking her hand. “I can see that. Shit, anyone can. The beauty, I get. Brian always liked beauty, but the—”
“Play nice,” Brian said.
“—brains, that’s a new one.”
“Hey, Andrew.” Brian’s voice was very light.
“Hey, Brian.” He let go of her hand but kept his eyes on hers.
“Still smoke?”
“I vape.”
“Me too.”
“No shit?”
“Care to join me for one on the sidewalk?”
Andrew Gattis cocked his head at Rachel. “Think I should?”
“What?”
“Join your husband for a vape?”
“Why not?” she said. “For old times. You can catch up.”
“Mmm.” He looked around the room, then back at her. “What were you dancing to?”
“‘Since I Fell for You.’”
“Who would dance to that?” Andrew gave them both a big, baffled smile. “It’s a hopeless song. It’s all about emotional imprisonment.”
Rachel nodded. “We’re trying to be post-ironic, I think. Or meta-romantic. I can never decide which. Enjoy your vape, Andrew.”
He tipped an imaginary hat to her and turned toward Brian and Caleb.
The three of them headed for the door, but Andrew Gattis suddenly turned back. He said to Rachel, “Google it.”
“What?”
Brian and Caleb, almost at the door, noticed he wasn’t with them.
“‘Since I Fell for You.’ Google it.”
“There’s about two hundred covers of it, I know.”
“I’m not talking about the song.”
Brian headed back toward them and Andrew sensed it. He pivoted and met Brian halfway across the floor and they went outside to smoke.
She watched them on the street, all three of them exhaling their vapor. They laughed a lot, like the dearest of old friends, and there was a lot of bro-fection—fist bumping, shoulder slapping, pushing. At one point Brian grabbed Andrew by the back of the neck and pulled him in so their foreheads were touching. They were both smiling, laughing actually, Brian’s lips going a mile a minute and the two of them nodding with their heads adhered like Siamese twins.
When they broke the clinch, the smiles died for a moment, and then Brian looked in the window and caught Rachel’s eyes and gave her a thumbs-up, as if to say, It’s all okay, it’s all okay.
This is a man, she reminded herself, who would literally give you the coat off his back.
When they returned, Andrew seemed interested in everyone in the room but Rachel. He flirted with one of Delacroix Lumber’s employees for a while, chatted up Melissa, spent a fair amount of time talking to Caleb, both of them wearing very somber expressions, and he got drunk with exceptional speed. Within an hour of arriving, he took one step sideways for every five steps forward.
“He never could handle his liquor,” Brian said after Andrew knocked one of the intern’s bags off the back of a chair and then toppled the chair trying to remedy the situation.
When the chair fell everyone laughed, though few seemed to find it funny.
“A buzzkill, this guy,” Brian said. “Always has been.”
“How do you know him?” Rachel asked.
Brian didn’t hear her. “Let me deal with this.”
He walked on over and helped Andrew right the chair. He put a hand on his arm and Andrew yanked the arm back, knocking a half-full glass of beer off the bar in the process. “You fucking roofie me, Bri?”
“All right,” Caleb said. “All right.”
The bartender, Gail’s CrossFit-addict nephew, Jarod, came down the bar, his face tight. “We okay down here?”
“Andrew?” Brian said. “The gentleman’s asking us if we’re okay. Are we okay?”
“Tip fucking top.” Andrew saluted the bartender.
Which pissed Jarod off. “Because I can arrange a ride home for you, sir. You follow what I’m saying?”
Andrew slipped into a rich British accent. “I do, my good publican. And I’d much prefer not to cross paths with the local constabulary tonight.”
Jarod told Brian, “Get your friend in a cab.”
“You got it.”
Jarod picked up the glass that had fallen behind the bar. Remarkably, it hadn’t shattered. “He’s still here.”
“I’m on it,” Brian said.
By this point Andrew had the scowling, inward look of the petulant drunk. In her youth, Rachel had seen her mother and two of her mother’s boyfriends sport similar looks as a regretful day crossed the plane into a regrettable night.
Andrew grabbed his sport coat off the back of a chair, almost toppling it as well. “You still keep the place in Baker Lake?”
Rachel had no idea who he was talking to. His eyes were on the floor.
“Let’s go,” Brian said.
“Don’t fucking touch me.”
Brian held his hands high, like a stagecoach driver in the Old West during a stickup.
“That’s some pure fucking wilderness there,” Andrew said. “But then you always liked the wild, Bri.”
He stumbled toward the door, Brian walking behind him, arms still half raised.
On the sidewalk two things happened almost simultaneously: The cab arrived and Andrew took a swing at Brian.
Brian easily ducked the punch and then caught a reeling Andrew in his arms like he was catching a woman in an old movie on her way to the fainting couch. He stood him up straight and slapped him in the face.
Everyone saw it. They’d been watching the drama unfold since the two of them had exited the bar. A few of the young interns gasped. A few others laughed. One young guy said, “Shit. Don’t fuck with the boss man, huh?”
There was something about both the speed and the casual ease of the slap that made it seem twice as brutal. It wasn’t the way someone slapped a man who was a threat, but the way someone slapped a child who was an annoyance. There was contempt in it. Andrew’s shoulders heaved and his head bobbed and it became clear he was weeping.
Rachel watched her husband saying something to the cabdriver, who was out of his cab and trying to wave off the fare, keep a potentially violent drunk out of his taxi.
But Brian handed him some bills and the cabbie took them. Then they both poured Andrew into the back of the cab, and the cab headed up Tremont.
When Brian came back in the bar, he seemed surprised that anyone had been paying attention. He took Rachel’s hand and kissed her and said, “Sorry about that.”
Half of her was still back at the slap, the effortless cruelty of it. “Who is he?”
They went to the bar and Brian ordered a scotch, slipped Jarod fifty bucks for his trouble, and turned to her. “He’s an old friend. An embarrassing, pain-in-the-ass, never-adapted-to-growing-up old friend. You got any of those?”
“Well, sure.” She took a sip of his scotch. “Well, I used to.”
“How’d you get rid of them?”
“They got rid of me,” she admitted.
That pierced something in him. She could see the pain find him, and she loved him very much at that moment.
He reached ou
t with the same hand that had slapped his friend and caressed her cheek.
“Fools,” he whispered. “They were all fools.”
18
CULTURE SHOCK
She spent the morning after the party Googling with a hangover while Brian went for a run along the river.
First she looked up “Since I Fell for You.” As she’d expected, the first page contained nothing but links to versions of the song. On the second page she found a reference to an episode of a TV show, L.A. Law, that had been on when she was in grade school. She remembered her mother watching the show religiously and once putting her hands to her mouth as one of the characters—a woman with tall hair and wide lapels—fell down an elevator shaft. Rachel looked up the “Since I Fell for You” episode on IMDb and nothing about the description struck any chords.
On the third page, she found a link to a movie from 2002 starring Robert Hays, Vivica A. Fox, Kristy Gale, and Brett Alden, with special appearances by Stephen Dorff and Gary Busey. She clicked on the link and got a 401 message that the site no longer existed. So she opened a fresh window and Googled “Since I Fell for You 2002 movie.”
Even with the added specificity, most of the links that appeared were to the song. Finally, though, one to “Since I Fell for You/May-December (2002) VHS eBay.” When she clicked the link, it brought her to eBay and a screenshot of a VHS tape. The enlargement function was for shit, but she did get close enough to make out the two main actors’ faces. It took her a minute to recognize the male as the guy who’d starred in Airplane. The female, she was pretty sure, was in Independence Day; she’d played the twit who’d risked everybody’s life at one point to save her dog. To the right of the photo was a description, probably pulled from the back of the VHS:
Widower Tom (Hays) finds himself falling for lovely housekeeper LaToya (Fox), who’s half his age. Meanwhile, Tom’s son (Alden) and LaToya’s handicapped roommate (Gale) are also falling for each other in this heartfelt dramedy that asks if love can ever be wrong.
Since We Fell Page 18