Just as I was sorting this all out, I heard a man’s voice, a familiar one, cut above the rest of the voices in the room. The voice was proud and commanding. Like it was pleased over how it sounded, and wanted others to be pleased as well. As I scanned the room, I had the feeling that my head had just been emptied of the thoughts it had contained only seconds earlier. And then when I spotted Glenn Kilburn by the L-shaped buffet table, I was certain that what Abby had said to me was as meaningless as my efforts would prove to be for the evening.
He was talking to two of Luke’s friends, men I had briefly met a few times through the years. They were all laughing and getting the attention of those around them. Glenn was wearing a dark navy suit with a royal blue dress shirt and no tie. He was now clean shaven, and I could see, even from faraway, that his hair, which never warranted much notice, was neatly combed and parted meticulously to the side.
The bartender, I realized from his tone, had been trying to hand me my beer. I took it and drank. And I watched Glenn. The men he talked with seemed rapt by whatever he was saying. There was no doubt that Glenn was a talker. A real connoisseur of conversation. He was a doctor. And probably a well-traveled doctor. He would have stories of Morocco and miracles and medicine. Taking another good long sip, I made my way towards my neighbor and his entourage.
“Here’s the party planner,” Glenn said when he saw me approach.
We shook hands, all the while his remark searing itself into my brain. I am the goddamn party planner, I thought to myself. He told me I looked well before stating that I must know Ron and Ethan, the two men he was entertaining. I shook their hands and told them it was nice to see them again. Glenn, it seemed, was not about to explain his presence to me.
“Having a nice time?” I asked.
He looked around and commented on the aesthetics of the place. Then he told me that my family and friends seemed to be enjoying themselves.
“Seems that way,” I said, probably a little drunkenly.
Ron and Ethan excused themselves to the bar.
“No drink?” I said, swigging at my beer.
“Not tonight. I’m on call.”
“Me too. I’m on call, too. It’s nice to be on call, isn’t it? Keeps you on your toes.”
There was no doubt I was drunk. Yet Glenn seemed amused at my absurdity.
“You sure I can’t get you a drink?” I asked, finishing off my beer.
“No thanks, neighbor,” he said, looking around the room.
“I’m sorry to say, Mr. Doctor-man,” I said, trying to pull back on the sarcasm, “that we won’t be neighbors for much longer.”
He seemed to refocus in my direction before asking what I meant. Pulling my phone from my back pocket, I began scanning through it, looking for the pictures of the E. 13th Street place. Luke suddenly appeared, carrying two drinks in his hand. He gave one to Glenn, who took it and thanked him. Glenn called him Luke when he did this.
“Gray was just telling me about some big future plans he’s got,” Glenn said.
My mind went blank for a moment. The noise in the room seemed to suddenly stop. It felt like all eyes were on me, waiting for me to prove I was in control of something. When I looked down at the photos on my phone, I remembered my intentions. Both men waited for me to say something. But my confidence was shaken.
“Aren’t you on call?” I finally said, motioning to the drink Luke had given to Glenn.
“It’s ginger ale,” Luke answered for him. “Now what about these big future plans?”
Glenn reached out towards me and took my phone from my hand. Then he rested his drink on the buffet table behind him and swiped his finger over the screen.
“Nice place,” he said.
Luke looked on as well. Then they shared a glance that had a perfect synergy to it, a steady, artful focus, like they were rehearsing for a spy film and the cameras might be rolling. Luke started to say something, but stopped himself. It was nice to see us, he said, but he needed to find Abby. As he walked away, he touched Glenn’s shoulder.
“Nice place,” Glenn said again, handing me my phone.
I took it from him in haste and told him he wasn’t family, that the party was mostly for family and that he was not family. A few of the guests nearby stopped talking and looked over at us. Calmly, Glenn told me Luke and Abby had invited him. Perspiration was beading up on my face, and I could feel my shirt sticking to my chest and underarms.
“You’re not family,” I said again.
“Take it easy, Gray,” he said, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it.
“We’re moving,” I blurted out, waving the phone wildly in front of me. “Laura and I are moving. To a new home. Where only family are invited.”
By this time, most of the guests had quieted. I spotted Laura from across the room. She had been talking to her sister. But now she was focused on me and Glenn, a hard, uncompromising expression turning her face into a maelstrom of discontent.
“Happy birthday, babe!” I yelled across the room. “We’re moving on up! To a deeee-luxe apartment in the sky-aye!”
Then I turned and hurled my phone against the wall behind me. It ricocheted back to me, landing at my feet. When I turned to face Glenn, he looked as sincere as I’d ever seen him. This made it all the more difficult to stare him down for a moment before spitting in his face at point blank range.
. . .
“You know what mob men do after a hit, don’t you?” Ben asked when I told him what had happened. “They lay low for a few days. They find a quiet spot and they lay low.”
“Where the hell am I gonna go?”
“Somewhere warm. Jesus Christ, get out of this city and find a beach somewhere. Have a few drinks. Clear your head.”
Ben’s advice was becoming redundant. I understood that he must’ve found it more and more difficult to respond to what was happening to me. Still, I was fed up with his vacation ideas. He needed to shadow me for a few days so he could see Laura’s eyes when she looked at me. He needed to come to my house and smell its new smell of whiskey and wood cleaner. He needed to hear the sounds of my life, which were silence and memory and regret all bleating out a weary cacophony every time I had a thought.
“Do you want to stay at my place for a while? If things are unbearable for you, you’re welcome to stay at my place. We’ve got the room above the garage.”
“You’re a peach, my friend.”
“Actually, what am I saying? You’ve already got a place, don’t you? A whole apartment. A beautiful, brand new apartment. Your very own bachelor pad.”
The realtor was understanding over the matter. She even laughed over the lie I told about Laura wanting to look at other places and how her indecision was the story of my life.
“You know what they say about a happy wife,” she said, her feminine politeness a refreshing sound to me.
“I certainly do.”
But really I had only a slight idea at best. My check, she told me, would be shredded the moment we hung up.
Three days after Laura’s party, I texted Andrea, asking about her job search and her writing and if she’d eaten any good Cajun food lately. She responded a few hours later, saying she’d recently returned from a weeklong jaunt to Panama with some friends. We went back and forth for a day or so, sticking mostly to simple pleasantries. It was a Monday evening when she called. I answered on the first ring. It took me declaring my boredom for her to invite me to a hotel.
“Why the fuck not?” I said, barely hesitating.
“Are you sure?”
“What was it you said about the vast slate of possibility?”
“About
that: I decided you were right.”
“Right about what?”
“About quoting oneself. It’s in poor taste.”
“What made you come around?”
“I think you just got inside my head.”
During my drive over, I decided to sleep with her. Not because I had to have her. And not for revenge, despite how easy it had become to imagine what Laura had been doing for the last couple of months. So I’d sleep with Andrea. And nothing would be solved. And life would only grow more complicated. Of this I was sure. Yet I’d sleep with her.
The thought of touching and smelling a woman up close thrilled me. I needed to feel the soft fuzz of miniscule white hairs against my body. I needed to feel like a human being again - like I wasn’t a pariah, a burden, a fucking saboteur.
Andrea had changed her hair and put on a little weight since the last time I’d seen her. Her hair was darker and shorter. It was bold and flattering. But it was the additional few pounds that really caught my attention. It was also flattering. Her breasts were larger and her curves more pronounced. There was a light in her eyes when she greeted me at the door of the room she’d rented. Her scent was all around, filling the space with a dense, lusty air.
“When was the last time you did this?” she asked.
The question caught me off guard. It wasn’t clear whether she meant sleep with a woman or go behind my wife’s back. The former excited me because it insinuated sex, which pleased me to think was on her mind. The latter implied I was a two-timing prick. As I made my way into the room, Andrea slowly backed up, all the while looking intently into my eyes. She was wearing a short, strapless black dress with a sort of built-in belt that was wrapped just a few inches below her breasts.
“When was the last time you did this?” she said, pulling a joint from her cleavage.
My expression lit up. I went from feeling seduced to feeling an almost starstruck awe. Sex and drugs, I thought to myself. She threw the joint at me, which I caught in a cup I made with both hands. Her brother and his girlfriend, she told me, had driven out from Penn State to visit her, bringing along a healthy quantity of the stuff. They had all smoked some together before going to a concert in the city, so she could vouch for its efficacy. Sex and drugs, I thought again.
“It’s been a while,” I said, unable to recall the last time I’d gotten high.
We set ourselves up in the room’s small sitting area and went to work on that joint. It was well rolled and it burned slowly. Andrea looked sexy as she got stoned. She held the joint like a cigarette and took long, even drags. Her eyes shut as she inhaled. And she never had difficulty holding the smoke in her lungs. When she exhaled, she did so with her mouth, and in graceful streams that made me think a genie might appear at any moment. After a few hits apiece, I asked about the room’s smoke detectors. Andrea laughed, choking a little and prematurely blowing the smoke out at me in a cloudy burst.
It didn’t take long before I was feeling it. We let the joint burn out before setting it on one of the end tables. Andrea curled herself up on the couch and told me she was high. We began to talk. First about nonsense. Our conversations veered all over the place, from her brother’s girlfriend, who Andrea said was beautiful in a 1950’s movie star kind of way, to the description of a candy bar she wanted but couldn’t remember the name of. Declarations were random. Transitions were nonexistent. Non sequiturs were abundant. I talked about Norman Mailer and a new deodorant I was using and an idea I once had for a sitcom about an ex-con bail bondsman who was raising his teenage daughter on his own. We both agreed that the bail bondsman facet of the show allowed for a lot of humorous conflicts.
Conversation flowed. We laughed in all the right places at one another’s contributions. And we’d congratulate the other if they made it back to a topic we abandoned without resolve. At one point, Andrea shot up and said she almost forgot about something special. She had planned ahead, she boasted. Then she walked past me, towards the closet, where she rummaged around for a few moments. When she returned, she was cradling two large bottles of pink lemonade, a big bag of pretzels, and a box with a pound cake in it.
“A great combo,” she said. “Definitely my favorite in times like these.”
I sat up almost immediately from the slumped mess I’d become on the overstuffed sofa. We went to work on the food and then smoked the rest of the joint. That’s when the conversation took a turn into new territory.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like I’m in high school,” I said, cutting a second piece of cake.
“Not what I meant,” she said, her voice singing the words at me.
“Oh. I get it. You wanna play therapist with me.”
She smiled. The bottle of pink lemonade was in her lap, both her hands wrapped around it, mindlessly massaging its neck and label.
“No, I wanna play doctor with you.”
When my eyes widened at this, our expressions locked and we both burst out laughing. Pound cake debris flew from my mouth and onto the floor.
“But we can start by playing therapist. If you want, that is. It’ll be foreplay.”
I’d always managed to be elusive with Andrea where my marriage was concerned. But she clearly knew there was a story there. Why else, she probably figured, would I be at a hotel with her on a Monday, smoking pot and eating pound cake? So I talked. And I told her everything that had happened to me and Laura in the last year. Without interruption, she listened, shifting her body a few times on the couch, but always maintaining focus on my story. She barely blinked. It was more than the pot, too; I could tell she was genuinely fascinated with what I had to say. Aside from the story, which seemed compelling on its own, there was confirmation given that I was not some cardboard cutout: I had a past, a wife, domestic troubles, a grown-up’s life. My story ended with me being at the hotel with Andrea.
“I’m not saying I’m justified in being here. I’m not saying I’m a victim in any of this.”
“Then how do you see yourself?”
Alone is what I wanted to say.
“I don’t know.”
For a while, we didn’t say anything. The room suddenly seemed darker than it had before. I picked up a few crumbs of cake from the floor and put them on the table in front of the sofa. Andrea started to say something, but soon stopped herself.
Finally, after a few moments, she said, “I would’ve done the exact same thing you did. Truthfully.”
Now it was me who couldn’t speak. She continued. My decision, she said, was courageous and difficult and right. She quoted Gertrude Stein - something having to do with instinct. I couldn’t listen to her. I couldn’t stand to hear her take my side over Laura’s. I needed her to side with Laura. Maybe then I would’ve slept with her. But she was singing my praises and telling me I was brave. Then, in nearly the same breath, she asked if I wanted to stay the night. This seemed to sober me immediately. I stood up and brushed myself off. I felt as though I could’ve cried at that moment. Really balled like a baby. I knew it was in me somewhere, a dam of tears ready to burst, shuddering my body and swelling my eyes. But I didn’t cry. It wasn’t the time or the place. And Andrea wasn’t the person to coax something like from me. I couldn’t stay, I told her, heading for the door. I wished her luck, which we both knew meant that we’d never see one another again. There was no necessity in explaining myself. That would’ve implied I owed her something. But because I didn’t want to make her feel foolish, and because I was still a little high, I thanked her for the pink lemonade and delicious pound cake.
The drive home was a treacherous one. My adrenaline kept me on the right side of the road. I felt somehow empowered. Yet I had no definitive speech or course of action where Laura and I were concerned.
All I knew was that I felt the unrelenting strength to demolish the brutalized parts of our past, to overcome them and spite them and do away with them forever and make peace with my wife and have a baby with her and for the rest of my life feel the soft fuzz of her miniscule white hairs against my body.
It was close to 11:00 p.m. when I pulled into my driveway where I parked next to Laura’s car. Both garage doors were open. The house was cold and dark. I’d wake her up, I thought. It didn’t matter if she’d been sleeping for hours. I’d wake her up and tell her what I was feeling. We’d sit in the dark of our room together, and with my words and her faith in them, we’d reinvent the true grace of the love we once shared. The house, I soon discovered, was empty. A sinking feeling found its way into my stomach.
As I walked next door, I discovered I was following footprints in the inch or so of snow that covered the ground. They led to Glenn’s front walkway, which was neatly shoveled. His front light was on, as were a few on the second floor. I knocked on his door as though it were mid-afternoon. I began to sweat a little. My mouth was dry and I could still taste the pot from earlier. But I was sober. The foyer light suddenly came on. I heard voices. There’d be no confrontation, I told myself. That was all over with. We’re adults, not jealous teenagers.
Someone began descending the stairs. I forced a calmness over myself. Glenn opened the door. He was dressed in a black Princeton sweatshirt and blue jeans. The way he smiled, slight and modest, suggested he was expecting me. I took a deep breath and told him I was there for Laura. It had been an extraordinary evening, I told him, one of a kind, really, and I needed to collect my wife and go back to our home and talk with her. There were no hard feelings between me and him, I said, and it would remain this way. I understood everything, I said. Understood completely. My voice was steady while I looked him in the eye as I spoke.
Pausing a moment, Glenn turned around and looked up the stairs, which were behind him. Then he faced me again and stepped outside into the cold February air. He closed the door behind him.
Everybody’s Out There Page 29