Finny

by Justin Kramon

  “Thanks,” Earl said. “It’s nice to hear that.”

  They were walking along the south side of Washington Square Park now. The arch, on Finny’s right, was illuminated, and the cement pit in the middle of the park was full of people. There were hippies with dreadlocks strumming out-of-tune guitars and singing. There were crowds of skateboarders, and college students. There were the drug dealers in trench coats, riding bicycles, holding open the flaps of their jackets to display their merchandise to passersby. There were couples holding hands or kissing on park benches. There were the chess men along the southwest entrance to the park, sitting over their dirty boards, saying, “Want a game? Want a game?” Squirrels and rats scurried across the paths, or scampered into garbage bags. Since her time with Earl in the city, Finny had always had an affection for this part of New York.

  “So where should we eat?” Earl said as they turned south on MacDougal, toward the noisy bars and falafel shops and pizza parlors, the music and the drunk people staggering out of restaurants.

  “I don’t know,” Finny said. “What kind of food do you feel like?”

  “Anything,” Earl said. “To tell you the truth, I’m actually not that hungry yet. I was so nervous, I don’t know how much my stomach can take. But I want to get you something good.”

  “You know,” Finny said, “I’m not that hungry right now either. Why don’t we walk and see how we feel?”

  So they walked. They turned right and headed over to Sixth Avenue, walked north on Sixth past the IFC theater; the bright windows of the sex shops; the mannequins with breasts like torpedoes; the newsstands; the men holding brown paper bags of pornography, ducking into the entrance for the orange line. They turned left on Tenth, headed toward the river, past the bistros and coffee shops. It was still warm, and the streets were busy and well-lit from all the open stores. A stream of cars flowed past them.

  “Oh,” Earl said. “Here. Before I forget.” He opened his bag and took out a copy of his book, handing it to Finny. “But promise me,” he said, while his hand was still on the book, “that you won’t look at what I wrote until we say good night.”

  “Why?” Finny said.

  Earl still had his hand clamped over the book. “Because I’m shy, and I have a tendency to be corny. Looking over all these old stories stirred up a lot of memories. So please indulge me.”

  “All right,” Finny said, and put the book in her backpack. “Anyway, what’s Mavis so busy with at work?”

  Earl looked down. They were stopped at a corner, next to a Starbucks, waiting for the light to change. There was a large brick building on the opposite corner, which Finny took to be a school. Its windows were dark.

  “She’s just very absorbed in her work,” Earl said. “It’s become kind of an issue between us.”

  The light changed, and they crossed the street, headed toward the school.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” Earl said. He seemed to be thinking about something. Then he said it again. “Yeah. I was just very disappointed that she couldn’t make it for this trip. This is a big moment in my life. It wasn’t the way I expected it to happen. I’d hoped I’d have some big book deal, and we’d be rich. But it just didn’t go like that. I got the sense that once she realized how small it was, she was disappointed.”

  “Earl,” Finny said, and put her hand on his arm, “you should be proud of this. The stories I’ve read are some of the best I’ve ever seen, no matter how much you got paid for them. You can’t let yourself worry about that stuff. You just need to write.”

  He was looking forward, and Finny took her hand from him. She wondered for a second why he wouldn’t turn to her, but then she realized his eyes were wet.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted us to have a nice evening together.”

  “This is nice,” Finny said.

  They were coming up on the water, and across from them was the West Side promenade, where joggers pounded across the brightly lit pavement, men and women on roller skates performed twirls and danced to unheard rhythms, homeless people pushed shopping carts and dug in the cluttered trash cans. They crossed the West Side Highway and sat down on a cement bench that wrapped a little swath of green garden, watching the people and the sloshing water, the gray clouds bunched like frosting on a cake, the distant lights of New Jersey. Finny put her backpack in her lap.

  “Why didn’t it work out with Brad?” Earl asked.

  “He wasn’t the right person for me,” Finny said. “I was fooling myself into believing he was. But he wasn’t.”

  “Why? What wasn’t right?”

  “Almost everything. He didn’t care about me. He only thought about himself.”

  “What did you like about him in the first place?”

  “I don’t know,” Finny said. “It’s hard to say. I think maybe I just felt like I needed to find someone. Like it was time. But I don’t think that anymore. I’ll be okay by myself. In fact, I’m making a career move.” She didn’t know what made her say it, but the moment she did, she knew it was true. She’d call Julie in the morning.

  “Move to what?” Earl asked.

  “I worked at this women’s magazine one summer. Not the typical kind, but sort of counter to that—a lot of pieces about how screwed up everyone is. My kind of thing. It was fun. I feel like I might have something to add.”

  “I think you’d have a lot to add.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  Earl glanced at Finny, then back ahead of them, like a driver checking his rearview mirror. “Mavis is leaving me,” he said. “She’s moving in with the French scholar. Jean-Pierre. Like something out of Les Mis.”

  “Jesus,” Finny said, looking at Earl. “I’m sorry.”

  “Like I said,” Earl went on, “she needs something bigger than me.”

  “That’s a dumb thing to say,” Finny told Earl. “It sounds like this might be for the best.”

  Earl shrugged. They both looked at the water, the heavy clouds above it.

  “You remember the old vineyard?” Finny asked him.

  “Of course,” Earl said.

  “Well, that’s where I went that night. When your dad was dying. Before I came and met you. I went back to the old vineyard.”

  “How was it?”

  “Pretty much the same,” Finny said. “Except for everything looked smaller. I think I like the memory better. Nothing’s the same when you come back to it.”

  “I know,” Earl said. “I like the memory, too.”

  Finny asked Earl what his plans were now that Mavis was moving out, and he said he wasn’t sure, it was all up in the air, he’d have to see. He just wanted to settle somewhere and start writing again.

  Then it seemed they ran out of things to say. They sat for a few more minutes, not talking, until Finny mentioned she was tired.

  “It was a long day,” she said. “I should probably get some sleep.”

  “Oh,” Earl said, “sure. Sure. I don’t want to keep you up. I know you’re busy.”

  Finny didn’t say anything to that. She saw that somewhere along the way it had been decided they wouldn’t have dinner together, though neither of them mentioned it. The moment had simply passed.

  Now Earl offered to walk Finny back to her hotel. But she said no, she was fine. The hotel was on the West Side, and she’d walk along the promenade, where it was safe on a warm evening. He protested, but she assured him she’d be okay by herself. She told him to call next time he was in the States.

  “I will,” he said.

  Then they parted, only a hug as goodbye. Earl headed east, Finny north.

  She was almost to the pier that stuck out like a tongue into the Hudson when she remembered Earl’s book in her bag. She unzipped her backpack and took the book out to see what he’d written. But when she opened the book to the title page, where she’d expected he’d written, there was nothing there. It was blank. She flipped the page, and still there was nothing.

  T
hen something fluttered out of the book. It was too quick for Finny to see it, but when she looked up from the book, she saw the object twirling and rocking in the breeze. She reached up and snatched it out of the air, held it up in the light from the overhead lamps.

  She knew instantly what it was: a blue and silver feather, the one she’d stolen from the pond with the exotic birds, the one she’d given to Earl the day she’d met him, on the hillside near her old house. All of a sudden, like a warm gust of wind, his words came back to her: I’ll treasure it always. At the time she thought he was being smart, sarcastic in the offhand way she herself had perfected. But she saw now that he was simply telling her the truth.

  She turned and spotted Earl standing on the cement island next to the West Side Highway, waiting for the light to change. He had his hands in his pockets and was examining the sidewalk like he’d dropped something there. He hadn’t seen her open the book, probably figured she’d wait until she got back to the hotel. She saw him step into the street, walking slowly, as if unsure where he was headed.

  Without considering what she was doing Finny called out, “Earl!”

  He turned, and when he saw her, he waved his arms over his head in his old way, like he was signaling an aircraft.

  He started walking back toward her, and they met on the promenade, next to the metal railing by the water.

  “The feather,” she said, smiling, though as the words left her mouth, she was struck by a feeling that could have been either happiness or sadness, she wasn’t sure. It swept over her like some dashing river, and for a moment she couldn’t speak.

  “I’m sorry,” Earl said, standing in front of her, looking at her with an expression of such honest longing that Finny could do nothing but take him in her arms. He began to cry, and Finny smoothed his hair.

  “I’m sorry for everything,” he said. “For disappointing you. For not being better.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “I don’t either.”

  And then he kissed her. It was starting to rain, a late-summer mist, and Finny felt drops on her face.

  Chapter 38

  A Final Look

  The wedding took place the following summer, outside the little brown house. Finny got a week off work. She’d taken the editorial assistant job. Julie was going on leave in the fall to do some teaching, and another editor was stepping up to take her place, leaving a spot open that had been promised to Finny. Earl had agreed to stay in New York as long as Finny’s work kept her there. She’d insisted on that before they started planning the wedding.

  The ceremony was held in the open air, the reception in a tent, and while it was all very moving for those involved, it is perhaps in some respects true, to rephrase Stein, that a wedding is a wedding is a wedding. Finny wore a white dress, Earl a dark suit. As a gesture of forgiveness, Finny had asked Judith to be her maid of honor, and in the pale yellow dress they selected, Judith was nearly radiant enough to eclipse the couple in whose honor the ceremony was being held.

  To her credit, though, Judith didn’t seek this attention. She was much less aggressive in her approach to makeup and jewelry than she’d been, and the dress she wore was more conservative, if more elegant, than the direction in which her wardrobe was tending when Finny visited her on Long Island. Judith had been accepted as an English Ph.D. candidate at Columbia—to everyone’s surprise, considering her age—and was set to start in the fall. She talked about it as a second beginning. Money, of course, wasn’t an issue for her. Her divorce from Prince was complete, and she came to the wedding alone. At the ceremony, Judith smiled and cried along with everyone else, and it seemed to Finny an especially significant development that Judith was happy to simply be one of the crowd.

  Poplan took her job as best man very seriously. Earl had considered asking Paul Lilly to perform that role, but Earl and Finny decided in the end that they wanted to involve Poplan in a more intimate way in the proceedings. In accordance with tradition, Poplan donned the dark suit befitting a groomsman, as well as a purple silk tie—her favorite color—and seemed to lower her voice just slightly on the day of the wedding, so as to be more convincing in her role. After presenting the ring to Earl during the ceremony, Poplan proceeded to bow formally to Earl, and then to Finny and the priest, and then to the entire audience. Though Earl was puzzled by the gesture, and no one ever quite figured out the reason for it, Finny assumed it was made in the spirit of celebration, goodwill, and general love of Asian cultures. As Poplan had predicted, she’d stayed on in the brown house, expanding her charity work to include not only the after-school program but a day care and a weekend activities center. She spent nearly all her time with the children, and as a mark of her enduring love for and dedication to Mr. Henckel, she required all of the kids to learn how to perform a successful smile-frown.

  Sylvan was of course in attendance as well, as a groomsman, and not at all offended that he didn’t have a larger function in the ceremony. He knew that Earl was much closer to Poplan, and Sylvan was much less willing than Poplan to cross-dress, which dashed any hopes that he’d be the maid of honor. One surprise about Sylvan’s attendance was that, like Judith, he came alone. In one of the phone conversations that had become a weekly routine for Sylvan and Finny once again, Sylvan confirmed Finny’s suspicion that, though he cared for Mari, he wasn’t prepared to commit to her. Finny was sorry. She liked Mari, and thought she was a good person. Though she knew that these were not strong enough reasons for Sylvan to marry her. They’d broken up when Sylvan had moved out of Philadelphia to start his practice in Westchester, just outside New York City.

  The other bridesmaid was Sarah Barksdale, Finny’s friend from Stradler and the daughter of Finny’s former principal. She also came to the wedding alone, never having gotten back together with Scott, the man she’d been engaged to briefly. Finny had debated for a long time over whether to invite the Old Yeller as well, since she held no particularly fond feelings for Mrs. Barksdale, and finally she decided to go ahead and do it. She left room for Mrs. Barksdale to bring a guest, assuming it would be her husband, though it turned out that Mrs. Barksdale’s guest was a much larger and more imposing presence. Miss Filomena Simpkin came dressed in the most formal attire Finny had ever seen her wear: a great expanse of blue crêpe fabric that, with the many plungings and billowings it made over Miss Simpkin’s generous form, had the appearance more of a rollicking sea than a party dress. Miss Simpkin also wore her signature white flower behind her ear.

  It was only after the ceremony, when guests were lining up to offer their congratulations to Finny and Earl, that Finny had reason to feel the slightest pinch of regret over inviting this pair. She overheard Miss Simpkin say that Poplan’s choice of wardrobe was “regrettable,” and Mrs. Barksdale responded, “Once again, Miss Simpkin, you have proven your absolute unassailability in all matters of taste. I had entertained a similar thought myself but was unsure whether to verbalize it, until my suspicions were confirmed by your impeccable judgment. Many thanks, Miss Simpkin. Many thanks!”

  Among the other members of the distinguished party, as Mr. Henckel would have put it, were the now-ancient Aunt Louise, who had to excuse herself periodically to call the cat-sitter; Earl’s agent, John Goines, who had just sold Earl’s first novel; Finny’s boss, Julie Fried, and her partner, Amanda; and Dorrie Kibler with her fifteen-year-old son. Carter had brought Garreth along to the wedding. They had both lost weight, and during the reception Carter explained they were on a carb-free diet. “You don’t know what it’s like,” Carter told Finny. “I dream of bread. I salivate when I pass an Italian restaurant. I’m like a pedophile walking by a kindergarten.” Garreth shook his head. “His trick is, he goes through a pack of cigarettes like it’s a box of Ding Dongs.” Finny laughed, and left them to argue it out. She knew how crabby Carter could be when he was hungry.

  A wedding always seems a hopeful occasion, and in many ways this one was, thoug
h it’s probably only fair to mention that there was also some sadness under the tent beside the little brown house. Finny thought of her parents, both long buried now, and of the dinners they used to have where she teased her father and fed Raskal under the table. She thought of her father’s burnt cooking, her mother sitting upright in the hospital bed and saying You have to understand, and Finny realizing, in that one moment, how much her mother regretted. She thought of Mona, adrift in a tide of sadness so deep and fierce she was never able to free herself. She thought of Mr. Henckel, gulping his coffee for the last time, his face drawn and pale, and the final words he’d offered Earl and Finny, his blessing.

  All these ghosts were in the room with them that evening as they danced and laughed and drank. Along with the spoiled relationships and bad marriages and illnesses and betrayals and failed friendships, the disappointments in work and love. As well as the questions: What made her call out to Earl that night on the promenade? Why did she accept his advances after she’d promised herself she never would? Was it simply affection? Or was the affection mixed with something else, something like pity or sentimentality? She would ask herself these questions again and again over the years, though never to a completely satisfying end. It was all too muddy, too stirred up with other things she felt. To know all the sources of love would be like knowing every stream that has fed an ocean.

  Whatever her reasons, Finny understood there was more of it ahead of her, both the good and the bad, and the uncertainty. To leave her at this comfortable place is not to suggest that life stopped here, only that it paused for a moment to take a breath, before beginning again on its winding course.

  There is only one further occurrence worth noting at this cheerful gathering, and that is the appearance, arranged by Poplan, of a genuine Irish fiddler. He came through the tent flaps, which were now tied open to let in the cool breeze. The sun was setting, and the light, in its final moments, had that wonderful clarity. The band stopped playing and the fiddler walked onto the stage. His hair was the color of a ripe tomato, and he had a spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks, like he’d been splashed with mud. He lifted the fiddle to his chin, raised the bow, paused dramatically for a moment, then began to play.