by Marian Thurm
He gets up from his seat now and approaches Cynthia’s table, where they’ve begun yet another fucking verse of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” First he wishes Cynthia a happy birthday, then asks, very politely, if they could please keep it down. He doesn’t want to hear “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” he explains, at least not when he’s eating first-rate Chinese food in this lovely restaurant. Quite frankly, he guesses that everyone else in the room feels the same way. “After all,” he points out, “this isn’t your private dining room, guys.”
The guitarist stops playing, and cradles the guitar in her arms. “You’re an asshole, and a cruel, cruel man,” she says, nice and loud, stentorian, really, so that everyone in the restaurant can hear, including the maître d’, who’s already headed their way. “Just because you said ‘Happy Birthday’ to Cynthia doesn’t excuse you. Go back and sit down, asshole, and finish your dinner,” the guitarist says. She plays a few chords, and sings, “. . . it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out . . .”
Furious at his mother for slapping Clare all those years ago, furious at the oncologists who failed so miserably to save his sister’s life, furious at the guitarist for her incivility and her simple-minded repertoire . . . and now what? The maître d’, a small guy wearing large, tortoise-shell-framed glasses, says, “Please, sir,” and ushers Roger back to his seat.
“Please, sir” what? he wonders.
“No trouble, please, sir. And we have a nice dessert for you, tiramisu, and also almond tofu. And green tea ice cream, all for you.”
Very nice desserts, on the house, the maître d’ says. He’s a gracious guy, eager to please, to smooth things over, but the music is going to drive Roger out of his fucking mind. Cynthia’s table is singing “Happy Birthday” in French now, but no one seems peeved; everywhere in the restaurant people are eating their dinner, some with ivory-colored plastic chopsticks, some with plain old forks, treating themselves to Grand Marnier Prawns, Dry Sautéed Beef, Crispy Smoked Duck. Not a one of them distressed, as Roger is, by the sight of a woman who’s lost her eyebrows to chemo and her guitar-strumming pal who can’t stop singing “Happy Birthday” to her, fearing, perhaps, that it might be Cynthia’s last.
“Let’s get out of here,” Roger says, gesturing that he’d like his check, please, to a nearby waiter who is busy assembling someone’s Peking Duck.
“Why do we have to leave?” Stacy asks. Because she and the kids are still eating, and what about the tiramisu and almond tofu they’ve been promised?
“They’ll pack it up to go,” Roger says, but declines to explain why, of all the people here in Jade Pagoda, he alone just has to get the fuck out.
He leaves his MasterCard on the table, and says that he and his headache will be out in the car. When he gets there, he goes straight to the glove compartment to massage the solid heft of that 9 mm Glock and it feels so good between his trembly hands, better than anything has felt to him in a very long while. Better even than the soft skin at the bend of his wife’s surprisingly dainty wrist.
~ 14 ~
It was New Year’s Day, and as Roger kept his eye on the Rose Bowl, now in its final quarter, Stacy explained to him that although her wedding dress was second-hand, there was nothing to be concerned about; it was merely “delicately used” or “gently worn,” whichever sounded better to him. She told him that, as she’d tried on the dress—with Clare’s help—in a curtained-off partition at the thrift shop, she imagined the bride before her who’d worn it and then left it on consignment, hung prettily, a couple of weeks after her wedding, among the Badgley Mischkas and Yumi Katsuras. A bride much younger than herself, a care-free twenty-something who—and this Stacy kept quiet about—had left behind the faintest fragrance, which she immediately recognized as Lady Speed Stick “powder fresh” scent. Even after Stacy had it dry-cleaned a whiff of it remained, but so what? Who was going to notice?
“Mischka and who? Those names don’t mean anything to me,” Roger said. He seemed insulted that Stacy had spent so little money on the dress when she knew perfectly well that they could afford something new and expensive.
“Well, guess what, the Wisconsin Badgers and UCLA Bruins? Those names don’t mean a thing to me.” Sitting down beside him on the couch in the den, winding her arms around Roger’s neck, Stacy joked, “Come on, babe, why can’t you be like all those guys who’d be thrilled to have a fiancée who saved them some money?”
But the Bruins were only minutes away from losing to Wisconsin, and Roger was no longer paying attention to her.
She went back into their bedroom and took another look at her dress; she now knew what a sweetheart neckline was, and all about Alençon lace, which dated back to seventeenth-century France, and would, years from now, be added to Unesco’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
S
It had drizzled on and off earlier in the day, but then had finally cleared around four o’clock; luckily for the wedding guests at the Botanical Garden, it was an unseasonably warm April night. The pain Stacy felt at her parents’ absence hit her hard as, just before sunset, she made her way down the six broad stone steps that led from the Garden Terrace Room and then, still on Marshall’s arm, strolled along the well-lit flagstone aisle, nodding and smiling at the guests. There were seventy-five of them seated, on either side of the aisle, in immaculate white-painted wooden folding chairs on the large patio overlooking the Bronx River. Stacy’s eyes were wet, and her nose actually began to run, and by the time she reached Roger in his tux—waiting for her so sweetly, so hopefully, halfway down the aisle—she was desperate for a tissue or handkerchief, neither of which was on hand when she reached the wedding canopy under which the ceremony would be performed by the baby-faced rabbi of Beverly’s synagogue. So Stacy had to use the clean white linen napkin that was meant to cover the wine glass Roger would soon, as was the custom, smash to bits with the heel of his glossy black patent leather wingtip.
“Happy Birthday!” he said as he took her arm, then lifted her veil to kiss her.
“And to you, monsieur,” Stacy said, but just couldn’t stop herself from thinking of Adolf Hitler an instant later. It wasn’t the first time she’d found herself wishing that Roger hadn’t shared that small piece of trivia with her the day they’d met.
S
She heard both during and after the wedding that the hors d’oeuvres were spectacular—what she remembered were the carmelized shallots with gruyère, pan-seared crab cake sliders, seafood fortune cookies, and miniature BLTs—but, as both her grandmother and Clare had predicted, Stacy barely had a taste of anything at all. She was too busy chatting up the guests—old friends; friends of Roger’s from New Orleans, San Francisco, and Chicago whom she’d never met before; Barbara Armstrong and several other people from her office; some far-flung cousins of Roger’s from Argentina; and people he’d worked with before going out on his own, most of whom seemed to be big tall guys like Roger himself, but with petite wives dressed all in black. These were the same guys who volunteered to hoist Stacy and Roger high in their chairs, as the band switched to some festive Hebrew music and the guests danced wildly around them and applauded, Jefrie and Clare most vigorously of all. It was, Stacy discovered, a little unnerving up there over the shoulders of Roger’s friends, and she was surprised at how uneasy she felt, afraid that she would bounce off her chair and land unceremoniously on the dance floor, her white dress and its twelve-foot velvet sash creased and torn and darkened with dust. But of course no such thing happened; she was, after all, completely safe, Roger (now her husband!) not six inches away from her high up in an identical chair, a brilliant, joyous smile displaying those lovely, perfectly straight teeth of his. She reached across the space between her and her husband and grabbed the tips of his fingers with her own.
S
The first item on the local cable news this morning is about a thirteen-year-old middle schooler here in Florida who savagely kicked a fifteen-year-old girl in the
head half a dozen times with his steel-toed boots, merely because he was angry about a text message the girl had sent him. Now the fifteen-year-old victim is in a medically induced coma and her thirteen-year-old assailant is in custody, charged with first-degree attempted murder.
“All this over a text message, for God’s sake!” Stacy says. “What the hell is wrong with this world? I mean, who raised this murderous thirteen-year-old?”
“Good morning to you, too,” Roger says, standing at the bathroom sink, foaming at the mouth, toothbrush in hand. After he finishes, he gets down onto the carpeted floor of the bedroom, where, with a pillow behind his head, he does two sets of fifty sit-ups, grunting and quietly counting aloud as Stacy describes the Flamingo Gardens to him. And explains why, exactly, Will and Olivia, still asleep in their beds at the moment, should have the opportunity to get a load of all that endangered wildlife—alligators, bobcats, river otters, and seventy species of birds, including falcons, hawks, and bald eagles. “Whatever,” Roger says. “Whatever you’d like to do is fine with me.”
He seems, Stacy thinks, a little more energetic today, a little sunnier, brightened by something, but who knows what? All she knows is that she’s grateful and relieved, and looking forward, with genuine excitement, to flying home to New York the day after tomorrow.
“I’m thinking we should buy a couple of souvenirs for Magnolia. We’re only paying her ten dollars a day, you know,” she says, referring to the elderly, divorced neighbor who has been looking after their cats this week, feeding them, freshening their water, and getting down on her plump, arthritic, seventy-six-year-old knees to clean out the litter box—the very thought of which makes Stacy feel guilty.
“Whatever,” Roger says agreeably. He’s running in place now in nothing but his boxers, directly in front of the modest-sized TV, its screen, Stacy notes, coated with the thinnest film of dust.
“You keep saying ‘whatever,’” she points out. “Please stop saying that, okay?”
“Whatever,” Roger says, and, still jogging, rotates a half turn so that she can see, by the expression on his face, that he’s teasing her. She sees, too, the graying hair on his chest and it feels like a blow of some kind, a kick in the gut that reminds her that he is nearly a decade older than she is, that his youth is a great distance behind him, and that most people would probably consider him surprisingly old to be the father of such young children. Not that he hasn’t taken exceptionally well to fatherhood; save for the past couple of months—since Clare’s death and the reversals his business has suffered—he’s always been closely attentive to the kids, never dismissive, listening to them patiently when they go on and on about their favorite shows on the Disney Channel or which classmate spilled what all over himself at snack time; sitting on the floor with Will for as long as it takes to build a small village out of Legos; keeping watch over Olivia as she stands on a chair at the kitchen sink and insists on helping to wash the dishes. And he does love to read to them: one of Stacy’s favorite photographs captured him lounging in Olivia’s crib, his long, long legs hanging out over the top of the wooden bars, reading Goodnight Moon to his baby daughter.
Stacy approaches him now, standing behind him and casting her arms around his waist as he jogs; she kisses one bare shoulder, then the other. “You’re such a good father,” she says, and he just keeps running in place, breathing heavily, giving away nothing but the scent of toothpaste and deodorant.
~ 15 ~
Other than the excellent pizza, thin-crusted and loaded with baby arugula that had been lightly dressed with extra-virgin olive oil, and served by a Japanese waitress in the small Italian town of Praiano, what Stacy would remember most vividly about their honeymoon was the terrifyingly narrow, serpentine roads tracing the Amalfi coast. How she and Roger, walking back to the hotel after dinner that night—Roger five yards ahead of her—had been forced to flatten themselves against the mountainside as a large, noisy truck came hurtling along in the surrounding darkness, its headlights offering the only illumination except the moon, Stacy’s heart thumping in terror as, for an instant, she contemplated the possibility that she and Roger would die together on this honeymoon, their bodies crushed beyond recognition, their friends and family back in New York sick with grief and not knowing whom to blame. Then, moments later, when the danger had passed and the truck was gone, and Roger reversed direction and walked back toward her, she could sense, even in the dark, that he was laughing, that this was his idea of an adventure, and that, unlike Stacy herself, not for an instant had he imagined them to be in any real danger.
After dinner, returning to their room in the small, family-owned hotel where they were staying, the two of them stripped off most of their clothes and got onto the bed together, where they played a heated game of Scrabble on their travel-size board. Roger was an intensely competitive player, insanely competitive, Stacy sometimes thought. That night he hit his personal record-breaking score of 161 points for the word “injury”—there was a triple letter “J” ultimately worth a remarkable 120 points; and if that weren’t enough, Roger ruthlessly wiped the floor with her with words like “zygomatic” and “amelioratory” and “callithumpian”—a word Stacy had never heard of, but which he assured her was in the dictionary, and that it meant, oddly, “a participant in a boisterous parade.” Fine, if you say so, she said. He’d jumped off the bed and done a momentary but joyous victory dance dressed only in his boxers after totaling up that 161 points, shouting “Yesss!” so loudly and with such brio that Stacy had to laugh. But it was kind of juvenile, really, the silly dance and all that effort focused on racking up points. Why, she wondered, was it so essential to win? Why did he need so badly, so desperately, really, to beat his previous high score, and, of course, to triumph over her, his friendly, rather half-hearted opponent? It was a game they were playing—for relatively smart people, sure—but still, in the end, only a game, made of plastic and paper. It was useless to try and point this out to Roger, she knew. And she knew, as well, how much he hated to lose. He’d lost to her just last night, though not by much, not long after she arranged the word “blitzkrieg” on the board. He sulked afterward and had to be coaxed into making love; tonight, though, in the wake of his victory, there was no coaxing necessary.
Later, when Roger fell asleep, Stacy went into the tiny shower, which had a folding plastic door and beautifully tiled walls. She enjoyed relaxing in the stream of steamy water after a long day in the passenger seat of that BMW convertible that Roger took such pleasure in driving—those sinuous roads that scared the hell out of her were, for him, a great thrill to navigate. He’d promised her that they would arrive safely at the hotel by the end of the day, and they had. Even so, the thrill of getting there was his alone. But that was fine, she thought; surely there were other pleasures awaiting them.
Shutting off the water in the shower now, she reached for the handle of the door that was meant to fold inward, and pulled. And pulled. Again and again. But it simply would not budge.
She soon understood that the door, which had fallen off its tracks, was not going to open, not tonight, anyway, and that Roger was dead-to-the-world sound asleep and could not be awakened, no matter how loudly and insistently she shouted his name, or how fiercely she pounded on the cheap plastic door. She could see her bath towel where she’d left it, draped across the sink, out of reach; her halter top and drawstring pajama bottoms imprinted with cupcakes, and the books and magazines she’d brought along, were all in the other room. She sat with her back against the pretty, pastel-colored tiles and cried in frustration, feeling sorry for herself and pissed off at Roger, nice and comfy in their double bed, failing to hear her as he snored rudely into his pillow.
To add to her discomfort, she was goosebumpy-cold now that the steam had dissipated. Hugging herself miserably, she thought of her clients so stubbornly living out on the freezing streets of the city, huddling in concrete corners, hoping to shield themselves from an icy January wind. She remembered the day, thi
s winter, when she and Barbara Armstrong had escorted a client—a freckled, alcoholic Vietnam vet named James Blackerby—out to the Bronx, where they were going to get him settled into a room at a nursing home, the only one of the several dozen Stacy had phoned that agreed to take him. After returning from Vietnam in the seventies, James had gone back to school and become a successful landscape architect, but the drinking eventually took over his life. His wife had kicked him out of their house in the suburbs just after his fiftieth birthday, a half-dozen years ago, and his grown children had given up on him as well. On the way to the nursing home, he peed in his pants, and earnestly told Stacy and Barbara that getting drunk and staying drunk were his only goals in life. At least there was a trace of embarrassment in his husky voice when he’d confessed to wetting his pants. Without that, Stacy would have thought him utterly hopeless.
They had to open all four windows in the car, but the stench of urine was overwhelming, and Stacy carefully pulled the Chevy over on the Major Deegan Expressway. She went to the trunk, and found, as she knew she would, a spare pair of men’s work pants for James, who requested a cigarette and a change of underwear when Stacy returned to the car with the pants for him.
“I’m sorry,” she said about the underwear. It was chilly outside, and chilly in the car because they still had all the windows open even though the temperature was barely forty degrees. She was afraid to turn on the heat, worried that the scent of James’s piss would linger even longer if she did.