by Ben Greenman
“What was his name?”
“Michael.” The word crossed the space between them. “That was the day I went to the old studio. It wasn’t there. I broke down and called Jesse and managed to say hello when she answered. We started talking, carefully at first, about why we ended things, about how our lives had gone, about what we remembered and what we needed to remember. She agreed to let me come and see her. You were my ride. I had all the hope in the world. Then, last night, she said she didn’t think she could make a go of it.” He finished off the second beer, closed his eyes, and sat back in his chair. He looked completely bereft and, despite the fact that his eyes were closed, more like Louisa than ever. “So that’s that,” he said. “I guess it’s what the experts call closure.”
“I’m sorry,” William said, hearing the words emerge without any sense or meaning, and gradually the rest of the room returned: the men at the bar wrapping up the conversation about their ski trip, the intolerable sandwiches, the lottery machine strobing green.
Tom threw a twenty and two fives on the table. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said with great spirit.
The convenience store connected to the restaurant was stocked densely with chips, candy bars, sticks of meat, and a rainbow of sugared waters. The woman at the counter was speaking in rat-a-tat Chinese but understood enough to hand William down the pack of gum he wanted and to give Tom a small envelope of aspirin. Out in front, on a bench, there was a man about William’s age and a boy, no more than ten, stroking his father’s arm and looking impassively into the parking lot. One of them might have been blind. In the car, a few miles later, William mentioned them to Tom, but Tom was no longer with him. He had been musing on the passage of time, wondering whether people moved through it or vice versa, and he quoted Shakespeare on the matter, “I wasted time, and now time doth waste me,” and that last word had launched him into sleep.
SIX
And so William was back home, which meant planning the party Louisa had suggested, and checking on progress at the new house, and sitting on the deck of what would soon be the old house and watching the trees whose names he did not know sway in the breeze. He was trying to do some reading, too. Tom had encouraged him to pick up Cranston’s self-help book; the first time he had dismissed the suggestion, because it was the afternoon when he’d accused Tom of arson, and that day was best discarded wholesale. But on the drive home Tom mentioned it again, and William was in no real position to resist. He found a used copy, a compact paperback with a burnt-orange cover, and dipped into it whenever he had the time.
It was mostly unreadable, or rather readable only in bursts so short that the process could not fairly be called reading. The text was densely uninteresting, filled with bromides about life’s triumphs and trials illustrated with anecdotes drawn from Cranston’s own unremarkable experience. Still, something in the third chapter had caught his eye. “Life,” Cranston wrote, “is a series of substitutions designed to distract you from the fact of your deprivation.” The idea stayed with William. He had tried to forget about the loss of his job by spending time with Emma, and tried to forget about Emma by spending time with Christopher. Now, without Christopher, he was substituting again, with Cranston. But that would go soon, too, and something else would take its place. None of the options was satisfactory, but none was any less satisfactory than the rest, and even the first link in the chain, his job, was only helping him to cope with some other absence or emptiness. Recognizing this all as an endless cycle made him feel marginally less deprived, and he wondered whether he actually was laying down the foundation for a better understanding of himself. It was a cheering proposition, and it propelled him through the wasteland of chapters four and five.
In chapter six, another insight came forward. “An unhealthy impulse,” Cranston wrote, “should never be discharged in action, but can never be completely defeated by inaction; rather it should be concealed from the view not only of others, but of the possessor of that impulse.” A feeling of recognition circulated hotly through William, who underlined the passage and put a star in the margin.
For weeks during the summer, William had been keeping two secrets, one professional, the other personal, and he thought that when he came clean about his job, it would be easier to withhold the facts about Emma. Instead, when he disclosed his professional secret, he felt the personal one growing inside him with increasing pressure, trying harder with each day to break free. After the trip upstate with Tom, though, the count was back to two again, and he was calmer. “Maybe the second acts as a kind of buffer,” William said. “This way, if I have a sudden attack of honesty, I’ll just spill the thing about Tom and Jesse. Don’t you think?” Blondie didn’t answer.
William was going through the neighborhood with her, late at night, on a walk no one needed but him. It was cold and cheerless and he walked quickly, toward the open mouth of the cul-de-sac. He passed the Kenners’, saw the blue glow of a computer screen. He passed the Morgans’, smelled something baking. He passed the Zorillas’, heard the faint sound of a woman either crying or moaning, but flattened, like it was coming from a television. At the end of the street, he took Blondie left and came back up the parallel street. He stopped in front of Annie Martin’s house, which backed Emma and Stevie’s. It was dead quiet, which meant that Annie Martin was awake; when she slept, she ran the radio loud so that people would think there was life in the house. He passed through her yard to the border of Emma and Stevie’s lawn, where he looped Blondie’s leash around the low half branch of an oak. He whispered the dog’s name. He went farther into Emma’s yard until he could see her bedroom window.
Emma came into the frame in her underwear, brushing her hair. She wore a white T-shirt but then she took it off. Her breasts hung heavy, and her belly was emphatic beneath them. She traced down the middle of her stomach with her index finger and he remembered doing the same. She turned away from him, toward the mirror, and he felt the nearness of her body through the window, through the wall. Then a noise spooked him, a rustling in the bushes, and he crab-walked toward the right side of the house, where he encountered another noise. It was Stevie’s guitar playing, coming from the rearmost window of the garage. He was playing a series of notes, slowly, tidally. Each note had a shape, most round, some jagged, and yet they all seemed to fit together. It was beautiful until Stevie began to sing, and then it was something else. William shifted his weight forward, and just at that moment a cat scampered across his path, flashing eye-shine up at him. Blondie chuffed and rolled a bark in the bottom of her throat, and William untied her and hurried along the strip of lawn to the street.
The next day, he saw her again. He had stocked up for the party—rum and vodka, plastic cups and paper napkins, chips, dip, peanuts both plain and flavored, olives as big as eggs—and the young cashier had remarked upon the purchase, and he had said that it was all for him, and the girl had laughed, a bell in the afternoon.
At home, he unloaded the bags into the garage and leashed up Blondie for a walk. “You look awfully familiar,” he said. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
A shadow overtook him at the head of the street, just outside the Roth house, which had a paper scarecrow hanging in the great window that overlooked the front lawn. It was Emma. “You weren’t going to invite me?” She tried to sound indifferent, but she was out of breath from coming up the block. It was warm and humid, and half circles of sweat darkened her green blouse under the arms. Her hair was matted to the sides of her head. It occurred to him, for one crazy moment, to tell her that he’d liked it better through the window the night before.
“To what?”
“This party at your new house. I didn’t get an invitation.” They went under a shade tree that was either dead or close to it; Blondie circled the trunk as far as her leash allowed. “Look,” Emma said before he could talk. “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. But Stevie asked me and I don’t have a good answer.”
“What about the truth?”
> “Hilarious. He’s under the impression that all of us are friends. He talks to Louisa some evenings, driveway to driveway, just the kind of neighborhood chitchat that normal people do.”
“How do you know you’d even be able to come?” He indicated her belly. “You won’t want to bring a baby to a boring party.”
“Why not?” she said. “Just make it right.”
“And if I invite you, that will be right?”
“Sure,” she said. “Neighbors at parties of neighbors. Normal.”
“Okay,” he said. “Especially since the occasion is that we won’t be neighbors for long. I lived here for ten years and you chased me out in four months.”
Her expression cracked a bit, and what came through was sadness mixed in with a little bit of triumph. “Don’t be mean,” she said.
“Not mean,” he said. “Just saying.”
“We might not be long for this place either,” she said. “Corporate creative has really taken a shine to Stevie.”
“Corporate creative? A shine?”
“The less said, the better,” Emma said.
“I’m not saying anything,” William said. “So that should be best.”
“Hey,” Emma said. “Look.” Higher up on the tree’s trunk, William could see the edge of a honeycomb protruding from a hollow. “They usually use bigger spaces than that,” Emma said. “They smooth the bark near the entrance. Can you see?” She angled her head up. The wind freshened and gusted behind them. A spot appeared at the corner of the hive and bombed down at Emma. “Ouch!” she said. She hit at her own hip. “Damn it.” What looked like a bee’s corpse tumbled to the ground.
“It’s exactly like your dream,” William said.
“Yeah,” she said. She frowned. “That’s what I think about my life every day. Just like a dream.”
William wasn’t up for more conversation. He tugged on Blondie’s leash and headed for home, counting twenty steps before he turned and looked back. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, not exactly, but what he saw was a woman he had known for a few weeks, at most, staring up at a tree as sunlight dappled the grass beside her flatly.
SEVEN
He was deep into the invitation stage now. Fitch had said yes. Wallace had said yes. Tom had said no and laughed and asked if William minded if he set the phone down while he thought things through and then, without setting the phone down, said he couldn’t be sure because Jesse had reconsidered his offer, and then laughed again, with a hope that was also a fear that the hope was misplaced, and said that he couldn’t control the pace of that reconsideration and didn’t want to, because he wanted to fully deserve whatever came to him. “I’ll put you down as a maybe,” William said.
The phone rang back right after he hung up with Tom. “Hello?”
“Is this William?”
“It is,” he said, suddenly unsure.
“This is Bonnie Travis.” He couldn’t place the name at first, and then he remembered: the short, moon-faced woman who was married to Jim, Louisa’s ex-boyfriend. They lived in Seattle with a boy and a girl. She did something in sales. Bonnie.
“Hi,” he said. “How’s Jim?”
“That’s why I’m calling,” she said. “He’s dead.” Her voice, high and fluted, misshaped the word.
William caught his own reflection on the inside of the glass door that led out to the deck. It looked like a mirage. “What?” he said. It didn’t seem like enough. “How did . . .,” he said, and then stopped. Now it seemed like too much.
When Bonnie spoke again, her voice was frayed. “He’s been having a hard time. It started as money trouble and it spread. We haven’t been getting on.”
“We heard from him about a month ago, when you two were in town visiting. We were going to have a drink.”
“No,” she said. William let the line fill with silence. “He never even made that trip. He just wasn’t able.”
“But he said he was here. He said that you weren’t feeling well and that’s why he couldn’t come out to meet us.”
“He said lots of things, for lots of reasons.” She coughed a sob. “The funeral was small, just family.” It hadn’t occurred to William to think about the funeral until then. “I just thought you should know,” she said.
William was overcome by fatigue at first, but then he was overcome by the opposite. He walked down the hall to the bedroom, came back to the garage, ended up in the kitchen, uncertain what he was looking for. In the bathroom William looked at himself in the mirror. He saw a man who preferred illustration to photography, winter to summer, South America to Europe, basketball to baseball, who thought often of death, preferring to divert it into metaphor, and dreaded the days when he could not, who frequently experienced a violent hatred of the ways that people asserted their own importance, who wondered if he knew anything, especially the things that he once thought he knew completely. He flicked off the light and watched his reflection in the dark.
When Louisa came home, he greeted her at the door and said he had coffee in the kitchen for her and that she needed to come and sit. “There’s news,” he said.
“Are you expecting?” she said.
He laughed because he thought anything else, even a grave face, would be a kind of ambush. He let her get halfway through her cup of coffee. When he told her about Jim, her hand flew up to her mouth like a bird, and she began to breathe shallowly through her nose. Then she pulled her arms tight around her, each palm matched to its opposite shoulder; the muscles stood out in her forearms but they were not very strong muscles and the effect was one of failure. “When did we see him last?” she said. “He looked good, I thought.” She dragged an index finger through the wet corner of her eye. She looked like she would be wiping her eyes like that all night.
William wasn’t expecting a second call from Bonnie. “I feel like I owe you some more details,” she said. Her voice was thick and thin at once. “I found him.” She paused, though not long enough for William to say anything, which was a relief, and then she tipped forward into the rest of her explanation. “He was sleeping on the couch in the guest room. He was doing that more and more, at first because the kids snuck into our bed at night and woke him up, but then for no reason at all. On the night I’m talking about, they weren’t even there: they were at my parents’ house. But he never came to the bedroom, and I figured he was on the couch, like always. He was sensitive to noise and to light, so it was always like a cave in there, door shut tight, lights off. I came to get him in the morning and the door was open a crack and all the lights were on. There was a bottle of pills on the table next to him. I went to shake him, and the second my hand touched his arm I knew. It wasn’t just that I guessed. I felt it. The absence of it. I didn’t even try to revive him. I just called the police.”
A question stirred dimly within William, and he brought it into the light. “Did he leave a note?”
Bonnie made a harsh noise that sounded almost like a laugh. “Not just one,” she said. “Evidently this had been on his mind for a year or so. We were in debt and he wasn’t telling me. He was addicted to pills. He couldn’t sleep because he felt like everything was vanishing. He was worried that he had cancer. It’s hard to even tell what parts of what he said were true.” She drew a deep breath and this time when she spoke her voice was steely and tearless. “I have two kids,” she said. “A man with children shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”
“Terrible,” William said, meaning all of it. He kept most of the information from Louisa, except the fact that Jim had thought that he was sick, because that seemed like a plausible explanation for an impossible act.
The next morning, Louisa made coffee that she didn’t drink and started in on how Jim had looked the last time he had visited them. “He’d lost some weight,” she said. “Not too much, though. He said he’d been working out regularly, that he was cutting out red meat. Why would someone let vanity rule them, even a little, if they’re thinking of ending it all?”
“
He probably wasn’t thinking about it yet,” William said. “Or he was putting on appearances. Or he was fighting to stay afloat.”
“He had an uncle who killed himself,” she said. “Jim always said he couldn’t imagine ever doing anything like that.”
“That was twenty years ago,” William said. “Why would what he said then matter now? The person he became might not even be connected to the person he was.”
“If people are going to change so much,” Louisa said, “then we shouldn’t be able to remember them as they were. It’s too awful.” She got her things and went to the front door. It all seemed like labor and William suddenly felt that he, too, was moving with difficulty.
William called Wallace. He needed to arrange a time to pick up some paperwork from him out at the site. “Haven’t seen you in a little while,” Wallace had said on the phone, sounding a little forlorn. He told William he had to go survey a new site at some point, but that he’d leave the papers for him in the command center if he wasn’t around when William got there.
It was time to walk the dog, who wasn’t in the yard or in the kitchen or in the bedroom. William tried the garage, but no luck there either. Out of the narrow window facing the street he saw a shape flash by, and then another. Each darkened the window for only a fraction of a second, and the series of them signaled like a code. He opened the door and saw that it was a pack of boys on bicycles, racing and shouting each other’s names. “Your mother,” one of them said, laughing. Across the street, Emma and Stevie were getting into their car. William waved and Stevie nodded in return. His face was set, not exactly grimly, and he had a zippered duffel slung over his shoulder. He pointed at Emma and said something to her, though the words didn’t carry to William. They backed their car out and drove up the street. Was it the baby already?