Nine Inches

by Tom Perrotta

  “It wasn’t an affair,” he said, trying to move his puffy lips as little as possible. His whole mouth hurt, even his fucking tongue, which he’d accidentally bitten at some point in the proceedings. “It was just one time. Last night at the retirement party.”

  “I don’t care, Rick. I really don’t want to know.”

  Sims switched the ice pack from his left cheek to his right. The Percocet was starting to wear off.

  “We were drinking and she followed me into the men’s room.”

  That got her attention.

  “You had sex in the men’s room?”

  “No. She just stood there and watched me pee.”

  “Is that some kind of turn-on?”

  “I don’t know. We were drunk.”

  “So where’d you do it?”

  “In the parking lot. Up against her car.”

  “Congratulations.” She gave him a big thumbs-up. “Did you at least use a condom?”

  Sims winced. “There wasn’t a lot of planning.”

  “Terrific. Now we can both get herpes.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was really irresponsible.”

  “Or maybe she’ll get pregnant!” Jackie upped the volume on the fake enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t that be cool? One big happy family.”

  “That’s not gonna happen. I didn’t — ”

  “Really?”

  “No, I mean . . .” Sims knew he was talking too much, but he couldn’t seem to stop. Maybe it was the medication, or maybe just the feeling that it didn’t matter anymore, since he’d already been punished for his sins. “In her mouth.”

  Jackie made a face. That was one thing she could do without.

  “You’re such a stud. I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.”

  Sims moved the ice bag to his shoulder. He couldn’t remembering being punched or kicked in the shoulder and had no idea why it hurt so much.

  “I swear to God,” he said. “I didn’t know she was married.”

  “But she knew you were.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I hope you said nice things about me. Like how I cook your dinner and wash your underwear and take your kids everywhere they need to go.”

  “Jackie, please. You have to understand. I was a mess yesterday. This really fucked-up thing happened at the memorial service.”

  He told her about Heather Ferguson, the way she’d shoved him and cursed him in front of the coffin, in front of all those people, how he’d been kicked out of the funeral home and forbidden to go to the cemetery.

  “Can you believe that? After everything I did for her. All those phone calls and hospital visits, all the time and energy I gave to that poor little girl. To get treated like I was the bad guy . . .”

  Sims fell into a brooding silence. He wondered if he would ever see Heather again, how much time would have to go by before he could call and ask how she was doing. Maybe they could get together for coffee, he thought, maybe talk a little about what had happened, if she was feeling up to it. It would help to know what she’d been thinking, to have some kind of an explanation, if not the apology he deserved.

  “I loved her,” he said, surprised not just by the words, but by the fact that he’d blurted them out, and the terrible realization that they were true. “And she broke my heart.”

  Jackie didn’t say anything after that, didn’t even look at him. She kept her eyes straight ahead, leaning forward and squinting through the windshield as though she were driving through a blizzard. She seemed okay when they got home: she paid the babysitter, got Sims settled into bed with a fresh ice pack, and gave him another Percocet. Then she kissed him on the forehead with a little more tenderness than he might have expected.

  “As soon as you’re feeling a little better,” she told him, “you’re gonna have to find someplace else to live.”

  IT WAS harder than Sims anticipated to get a price quote on the SG. Mike’s uncle Ace — he was the famous ex-roadie, friend of Stephen Stills and Boz Scaggs, and lots of other notables — was suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s, and he wasn’t always sharp enough to talk business. Mike said it was tough to see him like that; he’d always been bigger than life, an ageless, incorrigible hippie who rode a chopper and chased younger women well into his sixties. Now Uncle Ace was fading away at the Golden Orchard Assisted Living Community, surrounded by decrepitude, losing touch with himself and his hard-rocking past. He didn’t care about his guitar collection anymore; half the time he didn’t even recognize his favorite nephew.

  “Used to be he had good and bad days,” Mike said. “But lately it’s more like bad days and worse days.”

  Sims didn’t mind the delay; it gave him a standing excuse to stop by the store on his way home and ask if there was any news. Mike always seemed to happy to see him and was always up for a little jamming.

  “You’re getting a lot better,” he’d tell Sims. “You must be practicing.”

  It gradually turned into a regular thing, three or four nights a week. They’d grab a burrito from the truck, talk a little while they ate, then retire to the Inner Sanctum to play those amazing guitars through those vintage amps, as loud as they wanted. The store was pretty well soundproofed, and there were no neighbors to disturb in any case.

  “Check this out,” Mike would say, and he’d launch into the intro of “Hey Joe” or “Texas Flood,” whatever song they’d decided to work on. “Is that sweet or what?”

  Mike was a talented musician — he’d been playing in bands since he was twelve — and a patient, generous teacher. He guided Sims through a host of classic tunes — “Mannish Boy,” “You Shook Me,” “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” — stopping when necessary to expound on any theoretical or technical issues that arose. The amount of new information was overwhelming at times — the major and minor pentatonics, the chord inversions, the double stops and slurs and whole-note bends — but it was exactly what Sims needed, a musical boot camp, an intensive, ongoing tutorial in the art of blues guitar. He tried to formalize the arrangement a couple of times, offering to pay the going rate for lessons, but Mike wouldn’t hear of it, though he did let Sims buy the burritos and keep the mini-fridge stocked with beer.

  When they were done, they would sit around for another hour or two, listening to Roy Buchanan and Buddy Guy and Hubert Sumlin, marveling at the precision and raw passion these artists brought to the music, and that indefinable something that made each one unique.

  “Holy shit!” Mike would say when something really great happened, a blinding solo run, or a single, piercing note at the crucial moment. He sounded incredulous, even a little pissed off. “Motherfucker!”

  It was usually pretty late by the time Sims left, and he always felt a little melancholy heading out to his car, partly because the thought of going home to the condo depressed him, but mainly because he felt bad for Mike, who wasn’t going anywhere. For the past six months, he’d been living in the store, sleeping on a couch in the back office, showering at a gym down the road. Talk about the blues, he said. He’d been out of work for two and a half years, ever since he got laid off from his IT job when the market imploded and everything went south.

  His marriage fell apart a year later, though he insisted it had nothing to do with his employment situation. The real deal-breaker was the Chester A. Arthur facial hair he’d decided to cultivate in an attempt to cheer himself up. He thought his new sideburns-and-mustache combo looked pretty cool, but his ex-wife begged to differ. She said it creeped her out and refused to have sex with him until he got rid of it. Sims didn’t say so, but he could see her point. Mike’s muttonchops were bushy and reddish gray, with a disconcertingly pubic texture, and the pointy tips extended all the way to the corners of his mouth.

  “What happened to the mustache?” Sims asked.

  “I got rid of it,” Mike replied. “As a peace offering. But that wasn’t good enough for Pam.”

  “You really got divorced because of your sideburns?”

 
Mike made an ambiguous bobbing motion with his head.

  “We had some other problems,” he admitted.

  “Did you ever go to counseling?”

  “We didn’t have the right insurance. But I don’t think it would’ve helped much.”

  Sims was curious because he and Jackie had recently tried couples counseling themselves. Jackie kept insisting that Sims had stopped loving her because she’d gained so much weight during pregnancy and hadn’t been able to lose it. In her mind, that was the key to everything — the reason why their sex life was so unrewarding, the reason why he never listened to a word she said, and the reason he’d fallen in love with Heather Ferguson, who was so much younger and thinner than she was. Sims kept trying to tell her that it wasn’t the extra weight that bothered him, it was her complete lack of interest in sex, her attitude of pained resignation every time he touched her. She said she only acted like that because of the way he looked at her, the disgust that he didn’t even bother to conceal.

  “I can’t forgive you for that,” she told him. “All those years you made me feel like shit.”

  They gave up after three sessions when it became clear that talking about their problems just made things worse. It was a relief to throw in the towel, or at least it would’ve been if not for the boys, and the knowledge that his relationship with them was broken, too, that he’d never get a chance to be the kind of father he’d hoped to be.

  He told Mike about their seventh birthday party, to which Jackie had grudgingly invited him. It wasn’t one of those fancy parties — no magicians or ponies or cotton-candy machines — just a bunch of neighborhood kids running around the yard in goofy hats, climbing on the cedar play structure that Sims had assembled from a kit three years earlier. He tried chatting with some of the other parents, but they treated him with strained, wary politeness, as if he carried some sort of communicable disease. But at least his boys were happy to have him there. Trevor, the bigger and sweeter of the twins, kept running over to Sims and jumping into his arms, the way he had when he was a toddler. Jason, smaller and more verbally adept, kept telling Sims that he loved him, though he also kicked him in the shins a couple of times, completely out of the blue, with what felt like genuine animosity. Both boys cried when Sims said good-bye — Trevor kept begging him to stay for a sleepover — and when Sims got back to the condo, he opened a bottle of bourbon and drank himself to sleep.

  “Tell me it gets better,” he said. “Tell me I’m not gonna feel like crap for the rest of my life.”

  Mike stroked his upper lip, the bare skin where his mustache used to be. He had two kids of his own, both in high school.

  “It helps to play the guitar,” he said. “That’s the only thing that works for me.”

  IN EARLY September, six months after they’d separated, Jackie invited Sims to Trastevere, the new Italian place in the center of town. He figured she wanted to talk about the divorce settlement, though as far as he knew, there wasn’t a whole lot left to discuss. According to Sims’s lawyer, the negotiations were substantively complete, just a few remaining i’s to dot and t’s to cross, nothing too momentous. The process had been surprisingly amicable; both he and Jackie had acted like responsible adults, keeping the best interests of the kids front and center, neither of them picking petty fights or making unreasonable demands. Sims had grumbled a bit about the custody arrangement — he would only get the twins on Wednesday and Saturday, and only Saturday would be an overnight — but Jackie had convinced him that the boys needed as much stability and continuity as possible during this difficult time of transition. And besides, he knew how much space they required, how much they loved kicking the soccer ball in the backyard and playing Wii sports on the big-screen TV in the basement rec room. He had no doubt that the condo would feel as cramped and depressing to them as it did to him.

  Jackie was ten minutes late, and Sims almost didn’t recognize her when she finally showed up. She was wearing a black-and-gray dress that he’d never seen before, very flattering, but it was more than that; it was the confidence with which she approached the table, the enigmatic smile and subdued little wave she gave him when their eyes met. He’d been aware of subtle changes in her appearance over the past few months — she’d lost weight, colored her hair, done something new with her makeup — but he hadn’t registered the cumulative effect until she sat down across from him. This was a new Jackie, a far cry from the frumpy, defeated woman he’d been living with.

  “Wow,” he said. “You look great.”

  “Thanks.” She studied him for a moment, her eyes narrowing with maternal concern. “You, too.”

  He knew she was lying. Bachelor life had been hard on him. He’d put on fifteen pounds — too many burritos, too much beer — and hadn’t spent nearly enough time outdoors. His skin was pasty, and he’d grown a salt-and-pepper soul patch that Mike liked a lot, but that had earned him a lot of good-natured ribbing at the Health Plan. His colleagues called him Jazzman and Dr. Beatnik and asked if they could borrow his bongo drum.

  “I gotta lose some weight,” he said. “I eat too much junk.”

  “You should hire a personal trainer,” she suggested. “That’s the only thing that worked for me.”

  “Trainers are pretty expensive. I don’t think I can afford one.”

  If Jackie heard the implicit criticism — after all, it was Sims’s money that had paid for her newly toned physique, not to mention the haircut and the pretty dress — she chose to ignore it.

  “It’s worth it, Rick. Not just for your appearance, you know? Just for the way you feel about yourself. About the whole world. It’s makes such a difference if you feel good about yourself.”

  Sims couldn’t stop staring at her lips. They seemed so much fuller and more sensual than he remembered. Maybe it was the lipstick, he thought. She hadn’t worn lipstick for years.

  “I’ve been playing a lot of guitar,” he said. “Getting pretty good, actually. I practice every night. It’s kinda what’s keeping me sane.”

  “That’s great,” she said, opening her menu. “It’s good to have a hobby.”

  Sims hated that word — hobby. Music wasn’t a hobby. It was a basic human activity, as essential as language or religion, though he didn’t imagine that Jackie saw it like that. Music had never meant much to her, not even when she was young. As far as Sims knew, she’d never had a favorite band, only went to concerts when she was dragged along by school friends or guys she was dating. It had been a rift between them, the fact that he had a musical life and she didn’t.

  “How are the kids?” he asked. “Everything okay at school?”

  “Jason’s doing fine, but Trevor’s struggling with the math, as usual. I think he’s gonna need a tutor.”

  Sims nodded grimly, adding another fifty or a hundred bucks a week to his mental tally. But what could you do? If the kid needed a tutor, he needed a tutor.

  “What about you?” he said. “Anything new?”

  “Well . . .” She hesitated for moment. “I think I’m gonna start studying for my real estate license.”

  “Really?”

  “I probably won’t make a lot of money at first, but there’s a lot of potential in the long run. Especially if the market picks up.”

  “Hey, that’s great. I bet you’ll be good at that.”

  The waitress came and took their orders. Sims kept staring at Jackie as she pored over the menu. She reminded him of someone, though he wasn’t exactly sure of whom. But then she smiled and said she’d like the scallops, and suddenly it was clear: the new Jackie reminded him of the Jackie he’d met ten years ago, the woman he’d fallen in love with and proposed to on the Staten Island Ferry. It was like she’d gone up to the attic and taken her old self out of storage, not just the face and the body, but that glow, that fresh, lovely glow that a woman gets when she knows she’s loved and desired. Sims hadn’t seen that glow for a long time.

  She must have been reading his mind because she smiled sadly when th
e waitress left and said there was something else she needed to tell him, a pretty big thing, actually: she’d been seeing someone for the past three months, a high school assistant principal named Paul Gutierrez, and they’d just gotten engaged over the weekend. She held up her left hand so he could see the diamond ring, right there where Sims’s bigger diamond had once glittered.

  “Paul’s a sweet guy,” she told him. “And the boys really like him.”

  “Wow.” Sims kept his eyes on her finger. It was a lot easier than looking at her face. “That was quick.”

  “When you’re our age, there’s not much reason to wait.”

  “Wow,” he said again. “How the fuck did that happen?”

  •••

  SIMS TOOK the news pretty hard. It was bad enough to think about Jackie sleeping with another man, but what killed him was the idea of this Paul guy living in his house, raising his kids. It was a weird, demoralizing feeling, knowing that this stranger would be helping Jason and Trevor with their homework, dropping them off at school, picking them up from soccer practice. Paul would play catch with them in the yard and take them on beach vacations, where they’d body surf and collect shells and little pieces of colored glass, and in the evening he’d take them out for pizza and ice cream. Maybe he’d take them on a day trip to the amusement park, where he’d ride the roller coaster, screaming along with the boys, and years later they’d all think back to that vacation and remember how great it was, how much they’d felt like a real family.

  Mike’s ex-wife had a boyfriend of her own, so he knew exactly what Sims was going through.

  “His name is Denny.” Mike shook his head, as if the name were too much to bear. “The kids talk about him all the time. Denny this, Denny that. Denny drives a Honda Element. That’s his big claim to fame.”