by Ted Thompson
When he had a lot of work to do, Larry said, he turned off the ringer. Anders had assumed that by “a lot of work to do,” he meant something like managing his portfolio, but Larry meant planting a kind of heirloom called Mr. Stripey. Raising tomatoes, he said, snapping a brown leaf from the bottom of a nearby plant, wasn’t just about bearing witness to the cycles of life—all that living and dying and producing of fruit—but about putting your hands in the ground. “Touch the place where we intersect with the earth, where our food comes from and where we’re eventually headed, get that stuff under your fingernails,” he said, “and you’re changed forever.” He’d been inviting classes from Bridgeport out there, elementary-school kids who had no idea their hamburger was cow and thought food came from bodegas. “Mostly I want them digging in the dirt,” he said. “That’s enough. I discovered the hard way they’re all plant murderers.”
In the week since Anders’s humiliating scrape with the law—a ridiculous incident, when he thought about it, the behavior of a crazy person—he’d been doing some evaluating. From what he remembered of that night, which unfortunately was almost everything, he recalled elucidating for the police officer that it wasn’t breaking and entering if he had a key to the front door, not to mention if the house was in his name, and especially if his wife—ex-wife, whatever—was standing right there. He remembered pointing, a lot of pointing, and though all the cop had done was scribble silently in his pad, the lights on his car still whirling, and all Helene and Donny had done was stand there staring at him in their pj’s and terry-cloth robes, that was enough. He’d ridden home in the back of the squad car with his forehead against the window and a Budweiser button still blinking on his lapel.
What followed, though, was a morning of such raw clarity, such sober awareness, that he found himself waking at dawn, flinging open the curtains on the low cotton sky and cleaning his condo to the grout. He filled his cabinets with groceries, bought end tables from a design store, and rearranged the furniture until it felt like a room that a person might want to be in. He took a brisk morning walk and spent the evening with books, adventure stories mostly, though over the week that followed he also ventured into the shelf of self-help tomes that Helene had pushed on him, books that turned out to be smarter than he had thought, that pinpointed some of his feelings with embarrassing precision and almost always ended by recommending meditation. Which he tried—he tried everything. He apologized to Helene on her voice mail and he ate less meat and he cut out most of the caffeine and all of the booze and with them the twin drugs of rage and self-pity, waking in the morning refreshed and calm and with a rare sense of clarity about the life he was no longer ashamed to say he was wrong to have left.
Larry and Anders wheeled the top dressing over to a row of pots and packed it with their bare hands. “Not too tight,” Larry said. “Like you’re tucking them in.” They worked in silence. Occasionally a fine mist would spray over the rows like in the produce aisle at a supermarket but otherwise it was still and quiet.
“So,” Larry said when they had them all packed. “Should we talk numbers?”
“Why don’t we go inside.”
Larry’s kitchen was an open palace of granite and brushed steel that made even Anders’s renovation seem modest. The range had eight different burners, none of which seemed to have been used, and the refrigerator was one of those restaurant-grade bunkers, the kind with a door that you had to use your whole body weight to open. They scrubbed their hands at the sink with a rough powdery substance that Larry said could also take the stain out of the tub, and he punched a button on the coffee machine. The afternoon sun burned through the clouds and for a moment the countertops were ablaze, the whole room awash in white. There was no way Larry had designed this kitchen himself.
“Nope,” he said when Anders asked. “Course not. This was her last project—took two full years! Turns out nothing says ‘It’s over’ quite like a warming drawer.”
The coffee machine gurgled. Larry poured them two mugs and held his to his lips, smiling. “So,” he said, the steam fogging the bottoms of his glasses.
Anders told him what he owed.
Larry took a small sip, seemed to let it linger on his tongue, and swallowed. “And here I thought you might have come by for a visit.”
“Look,” Anders said. “I don’t want you to loan me all of it.”
Larry crossed the kitchen to a drawer that held a leather binder of checks.
“Seriously, I was thinking maybe about an investment,” Anders continued. “Didn’t you say you knew a kid who was into some new high-yield—”
Larry wrote the check, tore it out, and held it for him.
“Look,” said Anders. “You know I can’t take that.”
“You still love her?” said Larry.
“I’m sorry?”
Larry held his gaze. “You heard me.”
Anders took the check.
He helped Larry until the sun was low and even the greenhouse was dark. His hands and his pants were filthy and as he drove home he could feel a smudge of dirt on his brow and a calm sense of accomplishment. It had been ten days since the party and already he felt renewed. Ten more like this and he might end up with a decent Christmas after all.
Driving past the clean rows of his neighbors’ condos, which were wreathed in garlands, he caught sight of the blinking halo of light that emanated from his place. Despite the complaints (“tacky,” his neighbors called it; “embarrassing”), or likely because of them, he had been leaving his display blazing through the night while he sank into the pleasant indent of his memory-foam mattress.
There was nobody around to complain—the streets, as usual, were empty and silent—but when he made it to the spectacle of his property, there was an unfamiliar car waiting for him in his driveway. It was a dark Escalade of the sort that carried diplomats and drug dealers. It was still running, mumbling some kind of talk radio, and had a license plate, he noticed when he got out of his car, from New Hampshire.
“There he is.”
Donny climbed out of the driver’s seat, his big car dinging, and offered Anders the engulfment of his hand. “Quite a place you got here.” He was grinning, as if acknowledging a joke. He had on a tie and a nice camel-hair overcoat with a pink ribbon on the lapel. It was all more private bodyguard than Wall Street. “Sorry to barge in on you like this.”
Donny, he noticed then, was looking at him with worry more than anything else. It was a look that triggered in Anders a vague memory from the other night of pointing at Donny’s terry-cloth monogram and shouting, “He’s the criminal! He’s the criminal!,” which was not only dumb but humiliatingly dumb. Beside them, a group of inflatable carolers were beeping noisily through the end of “Silent Night.”
“Come on,” said Anders. “Let’s go inside.”
During his final years at Bowdoin, Anders had expected to answer his door at 2:00 a.m. to a drunk Fitzy waiting to toss him around by his lapels, but it had never happened. After Helene moved in with Anders above the Penobscot, something in Donny had changed. The Fitzy who could drink a case of beer himself and had used their dorm-room chalkboard to illustrate for Anders the colorful definition of a dirty Sanchez was replaced by the quiet history nerd who had always been lurking inside him. He became sullen and studious, walking around with a large green library tome under his arm and the distant, vaguely cross look of someone who’d spent the day reading. The irony, of course, was that Anders found this side of Donny much more interesting and so, when he saw Donny ambling across the quad or barricaded alone at a table in the library, there was a part of him that wished there were a way to reconcile their rift, that wished, in short, that there was still room somewhere for the three of them.
So around graduation he stopped by Donny’s house, the A-frame out on Merepoint he rented with some other guys from the team. There had been a party there the night before; the yard was littered with bottles, and Donny was the only one up, sitting on a log in his sweatpan
ts and slippers, reading the paper with a plug of Skoal in his lip. It was mid-May and the summer folks would soon be back to claim their houses, hurling them all into the workforce for good, so there had been an end-of-days quality to the week, with lots of arms around shoulders and professions of love, and Anders had awoken that morning with the need to set things right. He brought a box of doughnuts and some coffee and a leather-bound copy of Marcus Aurelius, none of which seemed to surprise Donny, who was mostly interested in spitting his hangover into the bottom half of a beer can.
“Meditations,” Donny had said, holding up the spine of the book. “I like Aurelius.”
“I know. You took my copy.”
“Oh yeah,” Donny said and handed it back to him. “I already have a copy.”
“C’mon, it’s a gift.”
“Stuff’s all packed.”
“Okay, listen,” said Anders, standing with the coffees balanced on the box of doughnuts. “I’m sorry.”
Donny spit into his can. “For what.”
“What do you think?”
He stared up at him. “Haven’t the slightest.”
Anders looked for a place to sit but there wasn’t one.
“For Helene,” he said finally.
Donny wiped his bottom lip with his thumb.
“What about her.”
It didn’t take long for Anders to spill the exact terms of his regret, down to his guilt about having bluffed his way into the scholarship dorm to begin with, though he also mentioned that while he knew it probably seemed that he had broken the cardinal roommate rule, from Anders’s point of view, he had seen her first, and while that might seem like a lame excuse, it was the truth, and he knew that Donny knew that too.
Donny did little but smile and replace his wad of dip. “Feel better?” he said when Anders was done.
“Not really.”
At commencement, they sat alphabetically, so there were only five students between the two of them, and though Anders had looked to Donny several times for a nod or a smile or a shrug of recognition, Donny hadn’t once looked back.
“Here,” Donny said now, walking into Anders’s condo. He was holding out a bottle of something in a paper bag as an offering. “This is for you.”
“This is for me?”
“It’s a gift.”
Anders opened the bag to find a twenty-five-year-old single malt that, as if to prove its authenticity, had a fine layer of dust on the cap. It must have been the most expensive thing in the store.
“Christ,” said Anders.
“The man at the store said if you’re a scotch lover then that’s the one.”
Anders examined the label.
“You’re a scotch lover, right?”
“Bourbon.”
“Bourbon!” Donny shook his head. “Shit, I never could tell the difference.”
“It’s fine,” said Anders. “Believe me.” He hesitated, looking down at the bottle.
“You don’t have to drink it now,” said Donny.
“You don’t want any?”
“After sixteen years, you don’t want me to have any.”
He had confidence. It was something in the way he stood, in the easy way he waved off a drink, and, Anders had to admit, watching him from the kitchen as he relaxed into the sofa, in the comfort he seemed to have with his big body squeezed in a suit.
“It’s nice in here,” Donny said, looking around the room. Anders had replaced the gloomier Winslow Homers with a few prints that featured the New England coast without the grays and purples of gathering storms, and he had matched them to furniture that he found at an antiques store, bookcases and whatnots and an old lobster trap that served no practical purpose except that it reminded him of a happier time.
“Listen,” said Donny. He had leaned back into the sofa, had his ankles crossed in front of him. “I’d like to apologize.”
Anders came in with his scotch and handed Donny a glass of water. “Apologize?”
“For the way that everything has happened. I just feel terrible. I should have called you in the first place.”
Donny’s suit jacket was open and his tie had fallen to the side of his belly in a way that made Anders think of the lolling tongue of a dog.
“So I want to be completely up front with you now,” Donny continued. “Full disclosure. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized it’s all about communication.”
“What’s all about communication?”
Donny looked at him a second. “Relationships. People.”
There was something disarmingly genuine about him, a trait of his Anders had forgotten. He didn’t seem to feel shame the way most people did, and in his openness, he seemed to loosen the rest of the room too. It was with Donny that Anders had had his first negotiation about masturbation (Just keep it in the bathroom and everybody’s happy) as well as his first honest discussion about blow jobs (I just want to say to them it’s okay to yank a little; no good blow job’s a timid blow job!), and now, amazingly, it seemed he was having his first conversation about another man dating his wife.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Anders, sitting down. “That’s all in the past.”
Donny watched him for a long moment. “I appreciate that,” he said. “And if it makes you feel any better, I wanted to let you know I don’t blame you for what happened last week.”
“You mean my being an idiot?”
“Believe me, if I had a dollar for every regrettable thing I’d done after I’d had a few too many…” Donny shook his head. “Sorry about the golf club. You hear someone trying to get in at that hour and, well, everything in that house seems louder than it is.”
Anders looked at him. “I guess it does, doesn’t it.”
“Old houses,” said Donny.
Anders sipped his scotch.
“Well, anyway,” Donny said.
“How is the house?”
“The house,” said Donny, nodding. “Well, this is actually something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“How long have you really been there?” said Anders.
“A couple of weeks.”
“Weeks?”
“Maybe months.”
Anders looked down, took a deep breath. His scotch was half gone. “And neither of you ever thought to say anything to me?”
“Anders.”
“Considering I was the one who was paying for it?”
“Anders,” Donny said again. “I know that’s not true.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know about the mortgage. And I don’t blame you for anything. A lot of people were screwed over the past few years and there is no shame in it—I want to make that clear—not in this economy.”
“Who told you that?”
“I think we both want the same thing.”
“Was it Tommy? Did Tommy tell you?”
“Look,” Donny said. “Nobody wants to lose the house.”
Anders tried to rattle another sip out of his scotch. He had already finished it.
“I have it taken care of,” he said.
“Look, I’m still working and things are going quite well for me right now. It doesn’t make any sense for you to be burdened with it.”
“It’s not a burden.”
Donny nodded and uncrossed his legs and put down his water. “Okay, look.” He sighed. “I’ll give you ten percent over market value.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m making you an offer.”
“Do you know how much that is?”
“To be honest,” said Donny, “I don’t. But it doesn’t really matter.”
Donny had come a long way from tarring cracks on the state highways, and it seemed he was more than happy to make a show of it. In fact, Anders now remembered, he’d somehow gone from the quaint mom-and-pop world of heating-oil delivery to working for the natural-gas industry, a move that explained his suit and his corporate lapel ribbon and the gas guzzler in the drive, not to mention the bottle of
exorbitantly expensive scotch he’d brought with him and didn’t expect to drink. Donny had a lot of money, and it occurred to Anders that he had come over not to apologize, but to try and purchase what was left of his life.
“The house isn’t for sale,” he said.
“I can pay you today. Right now.”
Anders shrugged and put his glass on the table. “I’m not interested.”
Donny crossed his legs and settled into a pose that was vaguely feline. Outside, the wind had kicked up and they could hear the rattle of lights against the siding. “If I can be honest,” Donny said. “For a guy who worked so long in finance, I’m a little surprised.”
“That I’m not interested in money?”
“That you’re not interested in reason.”
“Reason,” said Anders, more amused than anything else. “You’re appealing to reason.”
“Come on,” said Donny. “You have to admit, this situation doesn’t make sense for anyone.”
“How old are you?” Anders said all of a sudden.
Donny exhaled and a short silence fell between them.
“Same as you,” said Donny. “Why.”
“Seems like an unusual time to suddenly want a family.”
“Anders,” said Donny. His tone had changed. “This crap has to stop.”