GJ tossed the marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers into the cart. When they paid, Greg made sure GJ saw the total, which was more than a hundred and fifty dollars. He wanted the boy to know Greg was being extravagant, generous, doing all he could to make his son feel at home.
That night they cooked the pasta, the noodles so mushy that they fell apart in the sauce. The salad bowl with its mound of leaves and puddle of ranch sat untouched, Deb halfheartedly attempting to pass it around. Greg and GJ took turns getting each other beers, racing to refill Deb’s wineglass, laughing and elbowing each other like they were both a lot younger. GJ handed Greg his lighter to get the grill going, and they used meat forks to roast the marshmallows over the blue flames.
The meat forks got white-hot, and GJ closed his lips over a mallow before Greg could warn him. “Ah, fuck,” GJ hissed, throwing the fork on the ground, and Greg felt so tipsy, so buzzed, as he used to call it, that he drew his boy in and hugged him, slapping his back, rejoicing in hitting flesh and not bone.
“You two have fun,” Deb said. “I’m going to bed.”
It felt like too much work to get the Jacuzzi going; there was the switch you had to turn on, and then you had to adjust the temperature so it didn’t boil you alive, and then you had to wait fifteen minutes, so he and GJ lay on the ground, in Deb’s freshly mulched herb garden, leaning up on their elbows to sip from their fresh beers.
“Dad,” GJ said.
“Hmm?” Greg asked. He was considering sleeping there, out in his yard under the night sky. It was chilly but convenient, and so soft.
“When you were my age, did you know you wanted to be an accountant?”
Greg thought. When he was twenty-three he was married to Marie, living in a garage their landlord claimed was a studio apartment. They had discussed divorce on their first wedding anniversary. He was out of college with a degree in finance, because finance sounded like money, which was what he needed more than anything. He had minored in history because he dreamed of becoming a teacher. On the day of his graduation, his mother had pulled him aside and said, Now it’s time for you to be a man and support your family. Teaching isn’t going to do it.
“No,” Greg said. “But I knew I needed to be a man and support my family. Your mom and I, we knew we wanted kids. So I started doing secretarial work at a CPA firm, and everything fell into place after that.” It was a half-honest answer. He wanted GJ to know that not knowing was okay, but that not knowing for the rest of his life was not okay.
GJ leaned up on his elbows and looked down at Greg. His lips were lined in chocolate. Greg ran his hand over his own mouth. “Did you ever worry that you don’t want anything at all? Like, you don’t want anything. You need air, food, whatever … But there’s nothing you can honestly say you want.”
“No,” Greg said. He had always wanted. Money, sex, freedom, food. He wanted all of those things at various points in his life, so bad that his mouth watered.
“I know Mom sent me here because she’s fed up with me.”
“Yes,” Greg said. It felt good, for a moment, to let Marie be the villain, but then he guiltily tried to soften the blow. “She loves you, but it’s hard to watch someone you love go through hard times.”
“I think this just might be who I am. The hard times, I mean. It’s just me.” He laughed. They were both sitting up now. The back of Greg’s shirt was damp and the unseasonably cool air blew across it. He felt chilled to the bone.
“It won’t be you forever,” Greg said. He felt sure of it. All GJ needed was a purpose. Maybe he’d fall in love. Or maybe he’d stumble across a job he truly enjoyed. Everyone eventually found their way.
GJ laughed again. “Thanks,” he whispered.
“You’re going to be all right,” Greg said. Something his own mother and father had never said to him.
“Yeah,” GJ said. He upturned the bottle and pulled the dregs of his beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He let out a loud guttural belch. Greg had taught him how to burp when he was a child, something that always made them laugh, and they laughed now, cheersing their empty bottles.
“Another?” Greg asked.
“Naw,” GJ said. “I was thinking maybe I could go pick us up a DVD.” Greg looked at him, the bloodshot eyes, the worn skin on his face as if he was ten years older. It was clear what he meant. He needed the car to drive around looking for a dealer.
“Now?” Greg asked.
“Yeah. We could have a double feature like we used to.” They had done that only once, the way Greg remembered it. A night just before he and Marie separated, when they’d both felt exhausted enough to do something silly, like be together on a Saturday evening. They’d ordered pizza, watched a couple movies, and then Greg had carried GJ to bed. When he came back to the living room, Marie was lying on the couch, naked, her pajamas folded neatly next to her, the TV and the lights off and her skin a cold gray in the moonlight. We can do this, she said. We just have to try harder. He’d sunk into her; sometimes relief is disguised as exhaustion. He wanted to try harder, too. But in the morning, in the daylight, they were who they were again. Marie was clothed, drinking coffee, not meeting his eye; she was his soon-to-be ex-wife, not that beautiful alien who’d stroked his back and whispered, See? See? into his ear the night before. Had GJ noticed? Did he know they tried again but were too tired to try hard enough?
“There’s a video store just ten minutes away,” Greg said. “Can you be back in twenty-five minutes?”
“Of course,” GJ said. “I already know the ones I’m going to get.”
“Twenty-five minutes,” Greg said again. “I’ll wait for you.”
GJ was gone four hours. Greg waited in one of the hard-backed dining chairs because it was by the window, but eventually he’d moved to the sofa in the living room, sitting in the darkness and falling asleep and waking when the light in the kitchen came on, GJ drinking water from the tap, slurping like a dog. Greg thought of standing up, signaling to GJ that he was there, watching him, but he didn’t. He lay completely still, listening to his son drink water like he’d been wandering in a desert somewhere. Besides, he knew what the boy would say. Sorry, Dad, I got lost.
At the end of the week he, Deb, and Marie drove GJ up to rehab. At the end of thirty days he went home to Marie’s, got a job as a valet at a steakhouse. He made it a year before his next rehab. He made it another three years. He made it only six months after that. It felt like GJ held Greg by his ankles over a ravine. At any moment he could let go and the whole world would go tumbling past. Soon Greg stopped trying to right himself; he got used to everything being upside down. All the blood rushed to his numb head. Everything numb, eyes closed against the floor of the sky. And then nearly three years after that, it was GJ who fell off the face of the earth.
Greg realized he,d left his wallet in the RV only when he was standing at the front desk at the Homewood Suites, and only then after the woman in the cheap maroon vest asked him if she could see a credit card and a driver’s license.
“Shit,” he said.
“Sir,” the woman said.
He walked to the lobby area, where there were old-fashioned phone booths with worn chairs the same color as the woman’s vest. He found the crumpled paper the tow truck driver had given him and called the number listed there. They were closed Sundays, the recording said. Greg laughed to himself. He had no wallet and no transportation. The woman in the maroon vest was openly staring at him.
Greg walked back to the desk. Pam, her name tag said. Manager in Training. Another Pam. Was there no Pamela left in this world?
“Pam,” he said. “Would you be able to take a credit card over the phone? My wife can give you the numbers if we call her.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s not an option,” she said, as if she were standing up to the school bully. Her hair was pulled back tightly into a ponytail of wet curls, her eyes upturned at the corners like she’d tortured her head into neatness.
He had been looking forward t
o a real shower; everything on his body felt filmed with oil or soap. He didn’t have to look to see that there were lunules of sweat under each armpit and crude wet smiley faces under each pectoral. Occasionally he got a whiff of Italian dressing, which he knew was the way his undercarriage smelled after he hadn’t bathed properly. He wanted to explain to Pam that he was doing everyone a favor, trying to check in to this hotel. He wanted to tell her there were 47 tiles that he could see; he wanted to ask if he could go behind the desk and count the ones he couldn’t. He wanted to ask her if she knew 47 was a prime number, ask if she also found it odd 49 wasn’t a prime number. Instead he thanked her and walked out, through the rotating door and out onto the thin sun-bleached walkway. Cars were zooming past, racing down I-Drive to work or church or the grocery store or back home from Grammy’s or down to OBT to do whatever. It was a tourist’s purgatory, I-Drive, restaurants and hotels and T-shirt shops, Ripley’s Believe It or Not and a ferris wheel and four lanes of road that carried you a short jaunt to and from the theme parks. Greg thought he could hear screams on the wind, a roller coaster apexing and then shooting straight down. He dialed Marie from a pay phone outside a Denny’s, and ten minutes later he was in the Buick, joining the caravan of humans passing each other in purgatory.
“Thank you,” Greg said. “And I’m sorry. To be putting you out like this.”
She shrugged. “I was the one who invited you to stay in the first place.” The sun was the color of a mango, slipping down the horizon and dragging all the blue with it. The strawberry air freshener was swinging from the rearview mirror again. Greg felt grateful for it, happy to smell something other than his own body.
Marie’s condo had a large walk-in shower with two nozzles, one aimed at his midsection and one dumping rainwater on his head. She had a loofah and body wash with “exfoliating microbeads.” She had a seemingly endless supply of hot water. He washed himself, and then he sat on the cool tile floor, and then he lay on it, using the loofah as a cushion for the back of his head. The gentle patter of rain on his crotch was a revelation, subtly pleasureful but not enough to cause any real kind of excitement. He once had to spend a month sleeping flat on his back on the floor by his bed after he’d pulled something reaching for a shot glass. He hadn’t been able to lie on his back in quite some time. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get back up, pinned under his own weight. And it was true, it was difficult to rise, but when the water finally cooled, he found that all he had to do was fling his weight to the side and use his elbow to push up. His heart was pounding and he felt like a walrus trying to mount a bicycle, but it was possible; he’d done it.
His clothes weren’t wadded on the floor where he’d left them. In their place were a pair of men’s sweatpants and a T-shirt that looked like it would fit but be snug. They were GJ’s, Greg realized. Just old crap he’d left behind, but they felt precious to Greg, and he felt grateful to Marie for offering them. When had she come in to exchange the clothing, though? Had she seen him flat on his back, eyes closed and mouth open slightly, enjoying the water falling on his balls? He decided not to consider it for too long. He had GJ’s clothes; that was what to focus on.
She was in the kitchen, holding a fat wineglass, watching the microwave.
“I’m heating up Chinese,” she said. “If you want some.”
It felt like he hadn’t eaten since the bag of tacos; the Chinese smelled salty and unctuous and his mouth flooded with saliva. “That’d be great,” he said.
“Wine?”
“Does the pope shit in the woods?”
“Ha.”
He wondered if he should go into the kitchen and get himself a glass, but the kitchen was short and narrow, really only room for one normal-sized person or two smaller people. Definitely not room for him to push in, pin her against the counter with the fleshy dome of his heavy belly just so he could pour a glass of wine. And it was her kitchen, not his. He was a guest.
“I’m sorry I took so long,” he said. “It’s been a long day.” She handed him a glass. The wine was ice cold and so tart that it seemed to fizz. She had always preferred this kind of wine, wine that tasted and smelled like urine to Greg, but now he just felt thankful for every icy swallow.
“For me, too,” Marie said. The microwave beeped. She took out a container and stuck her finger deep into the middle of it. “Needs a little more time.”
He held his empty glass up. “Guess I’m thirsty,” he said. He was often guilty of trying to explain away his appetite, to justify his rages of hunger. At parties with Deb he would tell others in line at the buffets that he was getting plates for him and his wife, when really he was filling two plates just for him. At restaurants he sometimes claimed he hadn’t eaten all day, when in reality he’d probably been eating all day. At the bar he’d say it had been a long day, or he was thirsty, or he’d drink two at one bar and go to the next bar and drink three. They fell out of his mouth, these excuses, these lies, as if they were stones he’d been holding in his cheeks for too long. He knew it was better to say nothing at all, to stop calling attention to himself, but the stones still fell, plop plop plop. Marie upended the bottle over his glass; it grew heavy in Greg’s hands and he felt a bit more relaxed. He wanted to ask her to fill another glass up, just so he could always have one on deck, but he couldn’t even bring himself to ask Deb to do it. It was strictly a ritual he performed alone, on nights when Deb had a class or an event or book club.
“Why was it a long day for you?” Greg asked. He was careful to strip anything that might be mistaken for scorn out of his voice.
“Well, after you left, I sat here and cried,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No,” she said. “It was good. I had a lot to flush out.” Marie talked about her issues as if they were things she could purge, flush, work out, strip away. But she was not a crier, or at least she wasn’t in the years they’d been married, so Greg did feel guilty, even as he felt a bit superior, like he’d won something.
“I felt bad,” she said. “No. I feel bad. Do you remember when we got divorced? Didn’t you think we’d be done with each other by now?” She waited, watching Greg, the microwave heating the acrid food behind her. He nodded. “And yet here we are. It’s been so many years. It’s been so long. But we can’t be rid of each other.”
“GJ needs us,” Greg said. He took another rancid swallow. “That’s why we’re here right now.”
“It just feels like time moved on and we couldn’t keep up.” She took a long pull of wine, gulping like it was water. “When I’m around you, I feel like the past twenty years were a dream I had while I was stuck in quicksand.”
“Okay, Marie,” Greg said.
“No, I’m sorry. I don’t want us to fight. I just want to be honest with you. I just want to hear if it’s the same for you. If you also feel stuck. Isn’t this surreal for you at all?” she asked. She opened the fridge and pulled out another bottle of wine.
“It is,” Greg said. “But, honestly, my main focus is on GJ. Here, let me,” he said, gesturing to the wine opener. She handed the bottle and the gadget over to him, walked around the kitchen bar to stand next to him with her empty glass.
“We’re old,” she said. “You’ve been married to Deb almost as long as you were married to me.” She held out her glass.
“Marriage is never easy,” he said. He poured until the glass was nearly full, and then he topped his own glass off. He didn’t know why he was talking about marriage with Marie; he didn’t know why he felt compelled to give her any kind of a glimpse into the drywall of a relationship he and Deb had.
“Do you ever wonder why we chose each other?” she asked. The microwave beeped, but she made no move to check on the food. She was a bit drunk, Greg realized. Her hair was frizzed at the roots and her face sagged.
“What do you mean?” He took a step back.
“We were both virgins,” she said. “You were this gangly”—she flapped her hand—“hungover kid
, and I was going to go to New York and be an artist. Instead we hoofed it to the dorm and couldn’t get our clothes off fast enough. I hated you at first sight. Did you know that? You looked like you came from a Dumpster. Why did we choose each other? Why did we choose this life?”
He had loved her at first sight. The girl of his dreams, the dreams he had deep inside his own subconscious, dreams he would never remember, the kind of dreams that produce déjà vu and doppelgangers and surprise pregnancies and make momentary soul mates out of strangers.
“We were kids,” he said. “We were almost ten years younger than GJ is now.” She shook her head. “We were horny,” he said. “Okay? We were horny and maybe that’s just the long and short of it.” He drank his glass of wine in slurping gulps, poured himself another. His head felt coated in a light fuzz, as if he were a dandelion. It wasn’t enough; he felt afraid that Marie didn’t have nearly enough to drink in the condo.
Marie was laughing. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s exactly it. We were just horny!” The microwave beeped again, a shrill reminder. “Horny is such an old-person way to say it.” She looked at him, and Greg had the feeling that she was going to ask him something he didn’t know how to answer.
“I’m horny,” she said, like she was trying it on. She stepped forward, filling the space he’d tried to create between them, and then she slammed her wineglass down onto the Formica bar, and then she pulled him by the ears toward her and mashed her mouth onto his. It felt like grappling, her pulling his arms around her, Greg trying to maneuver away from the bar and all the glass, the bar stools scraping against the tile in loud honks, the assault happening in his mouth with her tongue fishing around and the realization that it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. They had kissed tentatively that day in her dorm room, but it made sense, after everything, with their son missing or dead and never fully theirs to begin with, that now they’d be gnawing, gulping, consuming each other. They’d traded one extreme for another. Gentleness for meaning it. Greg was supporting almost her full weight; she was pulling him down by the ears again and his back was beginning to whine. He tried to lean on one of the bar stools, but it skidded away from him and he fell, clutching Marie, pulling her down with him.
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