The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  “Are there more problems?”

  Rather than answer, he sloshed across the flooded chamber. He could see a hose like one on a vacuum cleaner coming up from the floor and disappearing through a hatch. That had to be the outflow from the sump pump. In seconds he followed the power cord over to the outlet, where it had gotten dislodged. His boots were made of rubber, so he applied a little pressure to the plug, and the pump kicked on. Immediately he heard water surging through the hose.

  “Found your second problem,” he hollered. “Sump pump was unplugged. It’s working now, and it ought to empty this place out over the next few hours. You’ll need to tell your husband about this hole, though.”

  “Is there a third problem?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He moved toward the water heater carefully, doing his best not to make waves. Fortunately, it stood on a cinder-block platform. The insulation at the bottom of the tank was dry. Stooping, he slipped through a second passageway and saw that the furnace was also on a raised platform, and its bottom was dry, too.

  Just ahead, on the stairway, where she’d remained standing, her legs protruded from her skirt. Seeing them like that—pale but shapely and separate from the person they belonged to—sent a shock wave through his groin. For a good while now, his sex life had consisted of several pitiful thrusts into his own hand late at night as he imagined his ex-wife beneath him, all that thick hair spread out on a pillow. While making love, Carla always kept her eyes open to observe the visual effect of her whispered obscenities, words she used nowhere except in bed. Now, he supposed, she was using them on Nowicki.

  When he reached the foot of the stairs, Kristin said, “I should thank you.”

  He’d gone out in a hurricane and slogged around in a flooded basement where a five-foot-long ball python used to live, and now she was telling him that she ought to say thank you, which indicated that for whatever reason she didn’t plan to? “Yes,” he said, “you really should. That’s exactly what you should do.”

  She stood there looking down on him, making no effort to move, leaving him no choice but to remain right where he was, since the stairs were too narrow to climb past her. She’d put her hands together, the left one clutching the right and squeezing it rhythmically. “That book?” she said. “The one you loaned me?”

  “Embers?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about it?”

  “I read it.”

  “Well, that’s what people usually do with books, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not. They’re much more likely to use them for doorstops. But I didn’t—though I wish I had.”

  Not being an aquatic creature, he didn’t intend to remain in the water one second longer and mounted the bottom step. He assumed she’d turn to climb up the stairs and he’d follow, and when they got to the top she’d bring him an old towel so he could dry his boots to keep from trekking water all over her nice floors. Maybe she’d offer him a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, but he’d decline. And then he’d go back home, turn on the TV and see where the eye of the hurricane was. Sooner or later the storm would blow itself out. They all do.

  To his surprise, she didn’t move, just continued to stand there, and when the moment grew too long for her, as it had for him, she laid a hand on his shoulder. “Would you hold me?” she said, though there really was no need to ask.

  an age of expansion

  in california, Cal had kept his distance from the neighbors. He knew the names of only two: Ann and Alex Neal, mortgage bankers in their sixties who lived right next door, on the other side of a redwood fence that he took it upon himself to maintain, replacing rotten boards and bearing all the costs. Because the Neals kept insisting they come over for a drink and get acquainted, Kristin finally prevailed on him to accompany her one Sunday afternoon a year or so after they moved in. The two couples sat together in the living room, which displayed all the worst traits of seventies interior design: green shag carpet, plaid wallpaper, a monstrous chandelier with transparent glass drops.

  Alex, it turned out, held strong views about “Mexicans,” a category that for him included everyone whose native language was Spanish, no matter their country of origin. “The ones I hire to do my yard?” he said. “Only the head honcho speaks a word of English, and he can’t understand half of what you tell him. He’ll just stand there shuffling his feet and saying Sí, sí. Problem is, he doesn’t see. Last January I dragged my Christmas tree outside, intending to pull it out of the stand. But the phone rang, so I ran in to answer it and got embroiled in a long conversation with a golfing buddy, and in the meantime they showed up and lugged the whole thing off, stand and all. There’s just something missing in the Mexican mind.” By rights, he maintained, they’d rebuild Manzanar, where they’d penned up “the Nips” during World War II, and incarcerate all “the wetbacks” there prior to deportation. Ann reached over, tousled his thick silver hair and urged her new neighbors not to think too badly of him. “He’s been a fine husband and father,” she said. “He doesn’t have a lot of ideas, but almost every one he does have is wrong.”

  To withstand the ordeal, Cal had three or four drinks. When they got back home, he poured himself another. Kristin watched him from the sofa, sipping wine while he strode around the living room with his free hand slashing air. “I’ll never set foot in their house again,” he seethed, “so don’t you try to make me. Who in his right mind would choose to waste the better part of an afternoon with assholes like that? There are better ways to kill time. You could listen to the Grateful Dead. You could oil the door hinges or take a fucking nap.”

  As far as Kristin knew, he never spoke to Alex again, though she sometimes saw him talking to Ann near the mailbox. But when their neighbor was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and drugged senseless, Cal went to the hospice in Sacramento every day for a week to sit at his bedside. Ann told Kristin she walked in one time and found him holding her husband’s hand.

  Now, here he was on the far side of the continent and once again thinking of fences. He’d spent the last few minutes hoisting sacks of sand, gravel and cement onto his shoulder and carrying them from the truck to the yard, where he propped them against a stack of rails and posts, and he had his garden hose hooked up and had grabbed the posthole digger when the guy who lived next door stuck his head over the rickety, knee-high fence that would soon be replaced. “Hey,” he said, “looks like you’re getting ready to build something.”

  Cal sighed. Later, thinking back on it, he guessed maybe he rolled his eyes. He’d been dreading the day when this guy would try to engage him. He was probably about sixty-five, maybe a little older, a short, tanned man who wore glasses and had a carefully trimmed mustache. He drove a small white BMW SUV that looked like it had become what it was against its better judgment, but he rarely left home. His house had plenty of windows and, since he never closed the shutters, Cal couldn’t help but notice that there were enormous flat-screen TVs in at least three rooms. Sometimes all of them would be going simultaneously—the Red Sox on one, the Patriots on another, Sean Hannity on the third. He kept the volume so loud that you could often even hear them over the noise made by his window units, which still droned day and night, though it wasn’t hot anymore.

  “Yeah,” Cal said, “I’m getting ready to fence off the rest of our yard. We’ve got a dog who’s tired of being cooped up inside.”

  The neighbor stuck his hand out. “Vincenzo,” he said. “But my friends, which I hope you’re gonna join the ranks of, call me Vico.”

  Cal laid down the posthole digger, walked over to the fence and shook his hand. Up close like that, he could see something white protruding from the man’s ear. At first he thought it was cotton, then realized it was a hearing aid. “My name’s Cal,” he said loudly.

  “Cal. That’s perfect. I noticed you came here from California.”

  “Yeah, we did. But Cal’s not for California. It’s short for Calvin.”

  “Like the guy that started the Methodi
st Church?”

  “I believe that was someone named Wesley.”

  “I’m Catholic. What do I know?” Vico spread his arms wide, palms out, as if to acknowledge his ignorance. “You like football?”

  “Not really.”

  “Baseball?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Food and wine?”

  He could see where this was going. “Yeah. If they’re good.”

  “Well, over at my house, if I do say so, they will be. I’ve been divorced for thirty years and cooked for myself every single day. I probably would’ve made a better wife than husband, except I’m one hundred percent heterosexual. Or I was, anyhow, back when I had the necessary tools.” He pointed at the BMW in the driveway. “In there, I’ve got two cases of Barbera. Among some, it’s got a bad name. But I buy good stuff. There’s this little group of guys that get together every week or two, usually at my place, to watch a game and eat and drink. They’re coming tomorrow evening. Sox versus Yankees. I’ll make a big pot of pasta. We’d love to have you join us. We could use some new blood. Any day now, one of us could bite the dust. It happens.”

  Cal tried to think of a good excuse but couldn’t come up with one. “Well,” he said, “the truth is, I’m not real sociable.”

  For an instant, Vico’s face froze as if in a fit of palsy. Then he laughed. “None of us are socialists either,” he said. “That’s just a mistaken notion a lot of people around the country hold about this state. Myself, I tend to vote Republican, but my buddies, they go the other way. Got an ex-cop in our group and a retired coach from Montvale High, and both of them used to be in a union. I give ’em a little hell about that from time to time, and they give me hell right back. See, I’m a retired CPA, did their taxes year after year, so they know I know the score. Our cop buddy routinely—routinely—took home a hundred forty, hundred fifty. Pulled so much overtime you wonder when he had a minute to eat or take a crap. Ever notice when there’s road work, maybe a couple of public-works guys patching a pothole, you got a pair of cops standing around in those slime-green vests, slurping Dunkin’ D and pretending to direct traffic? That generates overtime, and state law says you’ve got to have ’em. But I don’t call it socialism. I just call it two cops standing around getting paid for drinking coffee.”

  Panic was starting to set in, a feeling of claustrophobia, of being caught out and observed and bent to the will of another. “Listen,” Cal told him, “I need to dig some holes. It’s supposed to rain tonight.”

  “See you tomorrow,” Vico said, turning toward the BMW, which he’d spend the next few minutes unloading, toting boxes of wine, bags of groceries and a pot of daffodils into his house.

  that evening Kristin arrived home late again, at half past seven. He could tell from how she sank onto the couch, leaning back against the cushions while rubbing her eyes, that something was bothering her. A different sort of husband might have asked what it was, but he didn’t. If she needed to tell him, she would; if she chose not to, that was her business.

  “I finished the fence,” he said.

  “I noticed,” she replied, though he knew that was untrue. If she had, she would’ve said so right away. She’d always been appreciative of his efforts to keep everything in good shape, properly maintained. Her first husband hadn’t been able to do anything around the house. If the toilet was stopped up, they had to call a plumber. And he usually left the call to her.

  “It looks great, Cal,” she said. “Really.” She asked then if he’d made anything for dinner, and he apologized, asking if maybe they could eat out. He’d only completed the fence about half an hour earlier and barely had time to take a shower.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “Why don’t we try that Mexican restaurant down on Main Street in Cedar Park? The one the Realtor told us about?”

  “I don’t know about eating Mexican food in Massachusetts. I doubt it’d measure up.”

  She mentioned some vice president—of communications? Finance? Cal couldn’t keep them all straight, didn’t care to. “He says it’s really excellent, and he knows good Mexican food. He grew up in the Imperial Valley.”

  He acquiesced, in part because he wasn’t hungry. The conversation with the retired accountant had been troubling him all day. The longer he worked on the fence, the angrier he became. His worst fear about living here was coming true. The houses stood too close together. You couldn’t escape scrutiny. Pass gas and somebody’d hear it. The thought made him so mad he hit a picket too hard with his hammer and split it right down the middle.

  El Gallo Fino stood on the corner, in a building that wasn’t quite orange and wasn’t quite pink. It might’ve been a dress shop at some point, since there were two display windows large enough to accommodate seven or eight full-sized mannequins. Fortunately, the tables nearest those windows were occupied. If asked, Cal would never have agreed to sit there.

  The hostess, who at least appeared to be a Latina, wore a braided chignon, a Puebla dress and a gauzy shawl with floss embroidery. She led them past the bar, where several drinkers sat sipping margaritas, and through the crowded restaurant to a corner table. Handing them each a menu, she told them to enjoy their dinner.

  Kristin watched him cast an eye around the room. Except for one Asian family, everyone there was white and well dressed, lots of guys with loosened ties, as if they’d just arrived back in the suburbs from whatever Boston brokerage or law firm they worked for. The Mexican murals would strike him as stereotypical. Too many cacti on display, along with one sombrero-wearing peasant leading a donkey loaded down with mangoes. Ordinarily, she would have filled the silence by explaining how perfectly awful her day had been, that her stomach was churning so badly that she’d bought a packet of Rolaids in Andover and chewed them on the platform, not noticing the milky film at the corners of her mouth until Matt, who’d appeared unannounced, pointed it out. She’d told him about her day when they stopped for a couple martinis in North Reading. That made it hard for her to tell Cal anything at all, as did the fact that she’d insisted Matt drop her three blocks from the house, so it would look like she’d walked from the station if her husband happened to be outside.

  Cal opened the menu, examined it for a minute or two, then laid it down. “ ‘The elegant rooster,’ ” he said. “That’s what the name of the restaurant means. Although you can also translate it as ‘the fighting cock.’ ”

  “Sounds like a pretty big difference.”

  “Not really. It’s mostly just a matter of the bird’s mind-set.”

  A waitress appeared and placed a bowl of chips on the table, then asked if she could start them off with drinks. Cal ordered a Corona but told her not to stick a lime wedge in it. Kristin thought of another martini, then hesitated and said she’d have a glass of Cabernet. After the young woman left, Cal asked if anything interesting had happened at work, posing the question in an offhanded manner that suggested an answer in the affirmative was unlikely if not impossible.

  That afternoon, following lunch at the faculty dining hall with the provost and the director of institutional advancement, she’d returned to her office and logged into her e-mail. Her inbox was full of the usual detritus: communications from the athletic department about upcoming soccer matches and volleyball games, a reminder that all full-time employees needed to attend one diversity workshop each month, messages from students complaining about professors and from professors complaining about administrators, an invitation to the library’s biweekly brown-bag lecture—this week’s entitled “Ruminations on the Cape Town Climate Conference.” She scrolled through them quickly, deleting all but a couple, then logged out and, giving herself no chance to reconsider, typed umich.edu in the browser’s address bar. From the University of Michigan’s home page, her heart pounding, she navigated to the English Department and clicked on PEOPLE.

  And there he was.

  It had been years since she’d seen Philip’s face. She’d gotten rid of every photograph of them together, as well a
s all those she’d taken of him alone. He’d aged—of course he had, since everyone does—yet the damage displayed on her LCD made her recall an article she’d seen the other day in the Globe; underneath a photo of a badly breached breakwater wall in Gloucester, the headline announced “The Battle Against the Sea Is No Contest.” Phil’s chin, once so well defined, had merged with his neck, the skin on his jaw had grown flaccid, his hair was completely gray and, though he’d once bragged it would always remain thick, had thinned considerably. You couldn’t see much more than his face and the top of his torso, but the bunched fabric around his shoulders made it clear he was wearing a hoodie. One thing, at least, had not changed.

  He’d been wearing one the first time she saw him, on a bench in front of the Bull’s Head Bookshop at the University of North Carolina. She wouldn’t have given him a second glance were it not for the book in his hands, a paperback of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Seeing a guy who dressed like he did holding that, you couldn’t help but stop and stare. In addition to the hoodie, which read OLE MISS across the chest, he had on threadbare jeans and a pair of cowboy boots.

  He looked up before she could look away. “Have you read this?” he asked, flourishing it. “Or just seen the movie?”

  “I read it in Continental Fiction. I don’t think I could survive a fifteen-hour film.”

  “I’d go see it,” he said, “if I lived anyplace where they showed it.”

  It had played at a Cleveland art house when she was an undergraduate, but she’d passed up the opportunity even though her favorite professor said it was one of the three or four greatest films of all time. “Do you like the book?” she asked.