He shrugged. “It’s got its virtues, though you can’t escape the fact that it’s warmed-over Joyce.”
She’d been in graduate school for all of six weeks, living by herself in a tiny studio in Carrboro, in what was shaping up as the worst period in her life. Her father had called several times, but she kept hanging up on him, so eventually he quit. Her mother checked in every few days, though her voice sounded as thick as if her mouth were full of peanut butter, and most of what she said made no sense. Sometimes Kristin didn’t even bother to answer the phone.
He scooted over, so she sat down on the bench. “Döblin claimed he hadn’t read Ulysses,” she told him.
“Faulkner said the same thing from time to time, but I’ve seen the dog-eared copy he had in his library. While he claimed to be influenced by Döblin, there’s no evidence he ever read him. Anyhow, The Sound and the Fury came out the same year as Alexanderplatz, which didn’t appear in English until 1931. And Faulkner couldn’t read German.”
“Are you in graduate school?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen you sitting in the critical-theory seminar. You didn’t look particularly engaged.”
They’d been plowing through an anthology of works by Jameson, Derrida, Cixous and de Man, and she had yet to understand a single line of what she read. The course was required for all new comp-lit grad students. “I wouldn’t say I’m exactly overjoyed. I like novels and poems, and so far we haven’t read any.”
Comp lit was more theoretical than English, he said, but he didn’t like his classes any more than she liked hers. When she asked if he planned to become a Faulkner specialist, he laughed and said he wouldn’t be caught dead doing that. He told her he didn’t like bourbon, either.
What he did drink, she discovered that evening at a place called the Four Corners, was lots of beer. Specifically, Pabst Blue Ribbon, the cheapest brand on tap, a big frosty mug going for a dollar twenty-five. The pub was jammed with loud male undergraduates watching the World Series, both Philly and Oriole fans, and occasionally they jeered one another as if they were participants rather than observers. Later, she came to think it appropriate that their first evening together began in a contested environment.
When it came to books, he talked a great game. He’d grown up in a small Mississippi town, but he preferred Elizabeth Bowen to Eudora Welty and was a lot more interested in Ford Madox Ford than Robert Penn Warren. He’d read foreign authors she’d only heard of, like Ignazio Silone and Theodor Fontane, and he knew much more about poetry than she did. He was thinking of writing his dissertation, he said, on Pound or Eliot. Unfortunately, she’d always been attracted to slim guys who displayed a certain degree of taste when it came to food and clothing. Phil had the build of a linebacker, the position he said he’d played at Ole Miss, and he dressed like he was getting ready for a rodeo. He ordered a greasy hamburger for dinner along with French fries that he doused not in ketchup—that would’ve been bad enough—but mustard. Yet this naked disregard for social niceties might have been his most beguiling trait.
After their third or fourth beer, she asked, “Do you like the taste of this stuff?”
“PBR?”
“Yes.”
“Not really.”
It reminded her of castor oil, and she said so.
“Beats the hell out of the stuff I’ve got back at my place,” he told her.
“What’s that?”
At the time he was sporting a beard, so she couldn’t tell if he was blushing when he dropped his gaze to his mustard-streaked plate and said, “There’s only one way to find out.”
He had an entire house to himself, a boxy little prefab in a cul-de-sac off East Franklin. As he unlocked the front door, he said signing the lease on the place had been a terrible mistake. The monthly rent ate up half his assistantship and didn’t even include utilities.
“Why’d you do it?”
“Living in an athletic dorm for four years is like being in a zoo, except animals behave better. Guys would flip out the lights when you were in the shower and squeeze off a few rounds from a .38. Or they’d put a dead rattler in your bed. I wanted some peace and quiet.”
When she stepped inside, she experienced a shock. She’d expected a mess, not a sparely furnished but spotless living room. A love seat and sofa, a teakwood table, a single standing lamp with a white bell shade, a wicker basket full of newspapers, all of them neatly stacked. No TV, no stereo. “My grandmother bought me the furniture as a graduation present,” he said. “It was marked down after being damaged in the Pearl River flood.”
She followed him into the kitchen, which had a small Formica-topped table and a pair of ladder-back chairs. He opened the fridge and pulled out two white cans on which the word BEER appeared in black letters. “Generic suds,” he said, handing her one. “This makes PBR taste like Lafite Rothschild.”
They went back into the living room and sat down on the couch. He kicked off his boots and put both feet on the coffee table. “See the water stains?” he asked, pointing.
She wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, but there were a couple amoeba-like spots. “That doesn’t look so bad,” she said.
“It looks like hell, but I don’t care. To me, this is the lap of luxury. I’ll have to live someplace cheaper next year, but I’m keeping all my stuff.”
On his couch, time crawled and conversation moved in a circuitous fashion, just as it used to with Patty Connulty. She learned that his mother worked for the health department, his father delivered propane for a petroleum company, and most of his clothes had been bought by his grandmother, who favored polyester and rayon over cotton because they were “man-made.” He’d been a great high school football player—first team all-state, with six scholarship offers from Division I schools—though in college his interest in it declined as his passion for literature consumed him. From his sophomore year on, he just went through the motions, serving as scout-team fodder to keep his scholarship. He did most of his reading in library carrels because teammates ridiculed him when they saw him with a book of poems in his hands. An assistant coach who badly wanted to get rid of him wrote doggerel and taped it to his locker:
Some can block, some can pass.
I can read Shakespeare super fast.
She told him about the open-grate bridge spanning Penns Creek, how dogs couldn’t cross it, and about the time the Susquehanna overflowed its banks and they had to leave their house in a rowboat. She did her best to describe her hometown, enumerating the businesses along South Market Street, telling him about Little Norway, the winter theme park where she used to go skating. When he asked about her parents, she was less forthcoming, telling him only that they were still alive and were both teachers.
They argued about T. S. Eliot, whose work she deemed cold and inaccessible. He said it was the most intellectually charged poetry he’d ever encountered, that “accessibility,” in a culture guaranteed to value trash over work of substance, ought to be regarded as a dirty word by people like her and him, that if he could save only ten works from “the dustbin of history,” or whatever Trotsky called it, at least three would be by Eliot, The Waste Land, “Ash Wednesday” and Four Quartets. He opened yet another beer and quoted several lines from “Burnt Norton,” then paused for a moment and said, as if conducting a cross-examination, “Tell me, please, what’s cold about that?”
Before long, his face began to fade into a bunch of pixels. Through numbness and fog she heard him say something about running out of brew. He’d taken off the hooded sweatshirt, so she knew what to expect and had decided she’d let him do whatever he wanted to tonight and worry about it tomorrow. She hadn’t had sex for more than a year and never had a boyfriend who really mattered. When he finally stood up, she waited for him to offer his hand and lead her into the bedroom. Instead he said he’d take her home.
“Too drunk to drive,” she heard herself protest.
“I don’t intend to drive. We’ll walk.”
On occasion she swayed, and
in each instance he kept her from falling. By the time they reached her place, he was the only thing holding her up. He must have asked for the key, because the next morning she recalled that he’d been the one who unlocked the door. Evidently, though she didn’t remember this part, he’d chastely covered her with a plaid blanket. Around three, when she woke up in order to throw up, she was still fully clothed, the blanket neatly tucked under her side and feet. The next time she rose, it was eight thirty and light enough for her to see the note propped up on the kitchen counter against her teapot:
I shouldn’t have let you drink as many beers as I did, because I’m twice your size. I’m sure you’re going to be sick when you wake up. But if being sick doesn’t make you sick of me, I would like to see you again. I’ll wait outside your seminar on Thursday afternoon. If you’re angry or just uninterested, it’s okay. But maybe even then we could still be friends? Either way, I enjoyed our discussion, and I hope I didn’t get too insistent about Eliot. His poetry means a lot to me. It’s so full of risks, and it displays such disregard for convention. He was a very conflicted man and a pretty unhappy one too, but I believe that was the source of his greatness. I suspect it’s probably the source of most great writing and music and painting. I say that without ever having known a novelist, poet, composer or painter, except through his or her work and what I read in biographies. It’s an opinion I could possibly be talked out of. So who knows? Maybe you’ll try?
Her mouth tasted like metal, and the odor of vomit hung in the air, yet a feeling of warmth settled over her. She finally had something to share with someone. And her first thought, even after everything that had gone wrong, was that she must call Patty, who during the summer had married a guy she met at William and Mary and was living in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her second thought was that of course this was impossible. There was no one she could speak to with such scarcely concealed excitement—not Patty, not her father, not even her mother.
But this sad realization was displaced within seconds by an altogether different notion, one that would account for almost everything she did or didn’t do over the next eleven years: there was someone to share her excitement with, someone she already knew it was safe to hand a key to, and he would be waiting for her outside her seminar the following afternoon.
“No,” she told Cal, “nothing really interesting happened at work. Just the usual. Five meetings. Maybe six. I’ve forgotten.”
“Didn’t have to crack the whip on anybody?”
“No.”
“Anybody try to crack it on you?”
He was mounting an effort, but it made her feel like a piece of wood being probed for rot or termite damage, each thrust a reminder of all she’d lost. “No. No whips anywhere. That won’t really start until spring.”
“What happens then?”
“Retention, tenure and promotion. Or termination.”
“Oh. Didn’t that stuff happen sooner back home? Around Christmas?”
“No. It’s the same time it happens everywhere, every year. Departments make their recommendations in the fall, and the administration takes over in the spring.”
He lifted a chip and crunched it, swallowed, shut his eyes for a second. When he opened them again, it was as if he’d shed forty years and turned back into a boy. “That’s some chip,” he said, nudging the bowl toward her. “Try one.”
She ate a couple, and they really were good. Then the waitress brought their drinks and asked if they were ready to order. Kristin wasn’t especially hungry, but she glanced quickly at her menu and picked the chicken fajitas. Cal studied his for a moment or two, then asked the young woman about the pescado frito. She said it was excellent, so he ordered it, and she left them alone.
After that, they sipped their drinks, and Cal showed her that the nail on his right thumb was again torn and jagged. Having played the guitar with a flat pick for most of his life, he was now teaching himself to fingerpick, and in order to strengthen his nails, he said, he’d begun eating gelatin. “It’s made out of keratin, and it turns out that’s the protein in fingernails and horses’ hooves. I never knew it before, but they actually used to use horses’ hooves when making gelatin.” The contrast between where she was now, and where she’d been a short time earlier, was too painful to contemplate, so she pushed it out of her mind and was relieved when the waitress brought their plates.
Her fajitas were good, if nothing special. Cal, on the other hand, said his fish was magnificent and insisted she try it, so she took a small bite and had to admit he was right. It was spicy but delicate—exactly how this kind of fish ought to taste, he said, if you fried it properly. He asked her to give his compliments to the colleague who’d suggested they come here.
As they were leaving, he stopped at the hostess’s booth to tell her how great his meal had been. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, her face the color and texture of old leather, but she fluttered her eyes girlishly. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m pleased that you liked it.”
“Who owns this place?” he asked.
“My husband and I.”
“Well, I’m from California,” he said, “and I’ve been eating Mexican food most of my life, and this was as good as any I ever had.”
“We’re originally from California, too,” she said.
“Whereabouts?”
“A small town near Bakersfield. Delano. Have you heard of it?”
He didn’t say if he had or not. He didn’t say anything at all. To Kristin’s dismay, and the puzzlement of the hostess, he stood there mutely for an embarrassingly long time before mumbling good night, then he opened the door and stepped onto the sidewalk.
When he was sure she’d fallen asleep, he climbed out of bed, went downstairs in his bathrobe and, on the pad they kept by the home phone, wrote his neighbor a note. Dear Vincenzo, I am sorry but I won’t be able to make it to the dinner with your friends. I have too much to do over here. Best, Cal Stevens. He thought for a moment, then crossed out the last name and stepped outside.
The BMW stood in the driveway. Through the front window he could see one of the big flat-screens, Bill O’Reilly running his mouth and pointing a finger at the camera. Vico was probably in another room watching the Red Sox. He climbed the steps as quietly as he could and dropped the note through the mail slot.
When he got back home, he poured a couple inches of Booker’s into a glass. He was about to push the cork plug back into the bottle when he thought better of it. He filled the glass to the brim, opened the basement door, pulled it shut behind him and sat down on the stairs. In the darkness he drained about half of the glass, the whiskey searing his throat and making him gasp. At 127 proof, it would soon do what he needed it to. Until that happened, he’d have to sit here recalling how hot the southern San Joaquin got in summertime, heat rising from the pavement and the packed hardpan. The creek beds would have been bone-dry for months, and if you stepped down into one you’d need to be careful where you walked because it would be full of trash—aluminum cans, scrap metal, needles, broken glass. Anything you did required great care. You could lose your wits when it got so dry and hot. In weather like that you couldn’t even sweat.
in the fall of that year, leading up to the midterm elections, the country seemed gripped by malaise, with unemployment hovering close to 10 percent. In Massachusetts it had fallen to 8.4 percent, but improvements were hard to detect on a day-to-day basis. Downtown Montvale saw three Main Street businesses close: a liquor store, an Indian restaurant, a laundry. Even Frankie’s business had dropped off. He was still selling plenty of sandwiches, though he’d noticed lifelong customers buying their cold-cuts for less at Stop & Shop.
Everyone agreed the electorate was in a volatile mood, and not just in the red states. The Republican candidate for governor, a former insurance executive, was running a dead heat against the Democratic incumbent, and the local seventeen-term congressman faced serious opposition for the first time in years. The Republican victory in the January spe
cial election for Ted Kennedy’s old senate seat had weakened the knees of Massachusetts Democrats.
Matt Drinnan hadn’t voted since 2004, when he and Carla were still living in Cambridge. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about politics. He prided himself on being a man of the left and, back when he could afford it, had subscribed to both the New York Review of Books and the Nation, eschewing the New Republic because Marty Peretz kept making intemperate remarks about the Palestinians. In effect, Matt had quit voting because for a long time he hadn’t felt like he had a stake in anything.
So it was a sign of more than civic duty when he entered the Montvale Town Hall on a weekday morning in mid-October, barely beating the registration deadline. The clerk who handled his request, Sara McDonough, was someone he’d known all his life. At one time she’d been slim and pretty in the hippie manner, with straight red hair that fell almost to her waist. But in recent years she’d put on a lot of weight; and her hair, though still long, was streaked with gray. She and her husband lived directly behind Cal and Kristin.
While he filled out the form, she asked if he’d met the new neighbors.
“Yeah,” he said, hoping his cheeks weren’t as red as they suddenly felt. “I had dinner with them over there one evening.”
“I haven’t met either of them yet,” she said. “But every day, right around the time I get home, the guy’s up there on the top floor playing the guitar. First time I heard it I thought it was a record. He’s really good.”
He pushed the form back under the glass. “Maybe it is a record.”
“No, I’ve seen him through the window. The whole time he’s playing he keeps his eyes shut.”
She wore some of the thickest lenses he’d ever seen, even when she was a kid, and he remembered hearing she’d had trouble getting her driver’s license because she couldn’t read the wall chart. “I’m surprised you can tell his eyes are closed,” he said.
The Realm of Last Chances Page 10