After Annie (9781468300116)

by Tucker, Michael

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover the United States in 2012 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Michael Tucker

  The poem on pp. 50–51 is from Invisible Things by Jim Moore, published by Graywolf Press, 2011. Reproduced with permission.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-011-6

  I dedicate this book to a girl I picked up at a party while my wife was talking to somebody in the other room. That was forty-two years ago and I still can’t get her out of my mind. Sometimes a woman hooks you and you know the hook is set so deep it’s never coming out. This book is for you, baby.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Acknowledgments

  All men should strive to learn before they die what

  they are running from, and to, and why.

  —JAMES THURBER

  CHAPTER ONE

  HERBIE AARON CAN’T BELIEVE HE CAN’T FIND A BAR. HE pulls his cap down, turtles his head into his coat and works his way south on Madison Avenue, crossing Ninety-sixth Street. “In the middle of New York fucking City,” he mutters and a gust of wind fairly blows him through the window of the Rite Aid. A few snowflakes swirl around his head. It’s too cold to snow, he tells them. Herbie passes a faux-French bistro, which has shut down for the night. Deep inside his coat, he shakes his head with disdain. It’s not until he’s into the Eighties that he finds a bar with the lights on, an upscale place just off the avenue, down a couple of steps, with its name written in blue neon script on the window.

  “A boite,” he says. He pushes the glass door, which makes a satisfying whoosh and he’s out of the howling cold into the cushioned murmur of the bar. “A fucking boite.”

  Herbie talks to himself. He thinks these conversations all take place inside his head but he’s wrong about that. He’ll talk, he’ll work things out—like what he’s going to say when he gets to a party—over and over, making little adjustments until he’s happy with it. Sometimes he’ll argue with people, or lecture them—and even if he manages to not move his lips, you look at his face and it’s obvious there’s a whole three-act play going on in there. There was a woman in the Fairway, talking on her cell phone with her shopping cart parked sideways in the middle of the aisle, hundreds of gourmands in both directions unable to move, unable to shop. Walking back to his apartment he lit into her—with gestures—all the way up West End Avenue. He went on about her arrogance, her narcissism. She tried to argue back but he skillfully parried any attempt at self-justification. He verbally pinned her to the board like a butterfly, deftly, disdainfully. Don’t fuck with Herbie.

  He checks out the long bar and heads to the loneliest spot at the far end and piles his coat and hat on the stool next to him. Down at the other end are two couples who seem to know each other and one old guy alone, well dressed, staring into space.

  “I’m an old guy, too,” Herbie says, maybe out loud, maybe to himself; he can’t tell anymore.

  The bartender is all the way down at the other end, pouring white wine from a magnum. He can’t help but notice she’s a knockout. He cleans his glasses with a cocktail napkin just to make sure. She finally deigns to notice him and she gives him a look about how far she’s got to walk to get to him.

  “Last call,” she says.

  He holds his hands out, palms up—is there no justice?

  Her extraordinary mouth twists up in a smile. Lots of dark hair, pulled back off her face, cheekbones to die for. “Some of us have been here since five this afternoon,” she says.

  “I missed happy hour.”

  She nods. “You probably want a drink.”

  “Vodka rocks—a double. And if this is really the last call why don’t you bring me four of them?”

  “Oh great, a drunk. I’ll bring you one. Then if you’re a good boy, I’ll bring you another. Belvedere? Grey Goose?”

  “You have something in a cheap American vodka?” He gets a laugh as she walks away.

  It wasn’t his glasses. She’s the real thing. He watches appreciatively as she pours the double and walks it back to him.

  “Why you looking at me like that?” she asks as she puts down his drink.

  “You’re the second-best-looking girl I’ve seen all day.”

  “Your wife the first?” she says, gesturing to his ring.

  He nods and smiles. She returns the smile and a smudge of red shows up on her cheek. Girls love it when you love your wife, he thinks.

  “So what are you giving that look to the first girl that brings you a drink?” She’s an East Coast girl by the sound of it. Maybe Connecticut.

  “If I could stop looking I would.”

  He watches her walk back down to the other end to close out the customers. “If I had a granddaughter,” he says philosophically, “she would be older than this girl.” He takes a deep sip of the vodka and feels it go down. No amount of booze is going to make a difference tonight. “You are too beautiful, my dear, to be true,” Johnny Hartman is singing on the jukebox. Jukebox? It’s a sound system, asshole. Nobody calls it a jukebox. He snorts at himself and takes another deep pull. “And I am a fool for beauty,” sings Johnny.

  Booze is a woman, some guy told him once. Like having another woman on the side. That’s why it always makes his wife so crazy. A guru told him that, one in a long line of gurus he and Annie played with in the old days. Oh, they did some shit in the old days. They were a caution. They crossed the line and crossed it back again. It wasn’t the booze so much that drove her crazy. It was more when he drank and smoked reefer at the same time. She really hated that. She said he changed—that his personality changed. Which wasn’t true at all, according to him. “I’m inside here, where you can get a very good look at the personality,” he says. “And believe me, it’s the same.” Once, in a seminar they took up in Northern California—a weekend course at a hippie hot springs kind of place about some Hindu sex practice—they ended up getting it on with a couple of girls who were there on staff as sacred priestesses. The four of them got a room and rolled around for hours, trying all the combinations. “Girls,” he says to the ice in the bottom of his glass, “are great.”

  The other couples and the old guy pay up and say good night and the gorgeous bartender brings him another double.

  “This one’s on me,” she says. “Then you g
otta go home.”

  “You’re tired, I know.” Herbie half drains the glass and then gives her his sad, wise empathetic look—a look that he has down cold. She edges closer to the bar.

  “Are you famous? Those people were saying you look like that actor.”

  “Which actor?”

  “I don’t know. On television.”

  “Think about it: if you have to ask, how famous could I be?” Then he shoots her his wry, soulful, self-effacing look. This look almost won him an Emmy. She moves, if possible, even closer to the bar.

  “So, where’s your wife?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Lucky her.”

  He finishes the drink and slides the glass across like he’s putting her in check. She gives a half smile, half sigh and goes and pours him another. When she brings the drink back, she mimics his slide move.

  “So who are you?” she says.

  “What do you do when you’re not buying drinks for people?”

  “I sing. I’m a singer.” And again, the red smudge shows up on her cheek and Herbie thinks that if she could patent that blush, she could own the world. He makes a picture—a little club down in the Village, smoky, funky; she’s on a stool with the single spotlight framing her face; sad love songs, yearning songs; every guy in the room wants to make her feel better.

  “A chanteuse.”

  “Yeah, I guess. You like heavy metal?”

  Ping! Fantasy shattered. Herbie lifts his eyebrows and nods to her, like he’s saying “Hey, that’s great! Love that stuff!” She laughs out loud and walks away.

  “Sure, Herb,” he says to himself—when he talks to himself, it’s Herb. “She sings sad songs in the Village in a smoky room—on the jukebox.”

  The lights go on and Herbie flinches like he’s been hit with a stick. There is no more depressing sight in the world, he thinks, than when the work lights come up in a bar. Everything you came for disappears—including the next drink. He drains the watered-down booze at the bottom of his glass. He could have used the fourth one. He leaves her ample money and wrestles himself into his coat and hat. “Heavy metal, my ass,” he says as he whooshes back out into the empty night.

  The tenth floor at Mt. Sinai has lighting as bad as when the bartender turned the lights on. Everybody looks like they’re in a porn film. Herbie waves to the night nurse and she calls him over.

  “She’s still sleeping, Mr. Aaron.”

  “Good. I’ll be quiet.” The nurse gives him a nice smile and he gives it back to her. Annie’s room is dimly lit, just a small lamp next to the armchair at the foot of her bed. He clears some things off of it—some books and a New Yorker that he’d brought over earlier—and settles in. She looks to him like she's eight years old, snoozing away without a care in the world. He wishes he knew her then.

  Three months ago they were trodding the boards, as they say. They were doing a musical together—Off-Off-Broadway, where the salaries are dazzling. They had a ball, working with young people, dancing and singing. All the kids idolized them like they were the Lunts or something. We’re the Lumps, he told them, a lesser-known show biz couple. One night they came offstage after a scene in the second act and he whispered to her as he always does, “How’d you feel?” The next scene was already playing so they quietly picked their way past the stored scenery pieces and props on their way to the dressing room.

  “Good,” she whispered back to him. “Better tonight, I thought.”

  “Yeah, me, too. I finally got the laugh on that fucking birthday line. Only took me seven weeks to figure it out.” They were now in the hallway.

  “You mean when you say, ‘It’s not my birthday’?”

  “Yeah. A big laugh—finally. I played it like I couldn’t believe you thought it was my birthday after all these years and… what?”

  She was smiling and shaking her head.

  “What?”

  “That was me, honey.”

  “What was you?”

  “When you turned away, I did this little thing with my eyebrow—like this.”

  She showed him how she raised her left eyebrow in an expression of “give me strength.”

  “Brought the house down,” she said with barely concealed smugness.

  “You were making a face on my line?”

  “Oh come on, it’s not your line. It’s our line. When one person is talking, the other one doesn’t go dead. It’s a scene between two living people.” He stops at the water cooler to get a drink.

  “I thought I had finally figured out that moment.”

  “Nope.”

  They had met in their early twenties—thirty-eight years ago at a repertory theater in Cleveland. They were both in the cast of a production of Mother Courage. He was married to someone else and she was fresh out of drama school. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. He courted her with Samuel Beckett, quoting lines from Waiting for Godot—all about how we’re all trying to fill up the time so that we don’t have to think about how meaningless and desperate our lives are. It may not sound like much of a come-on but he knew his girl. By the second week of rehearsal they were sneaking off to her apartment for a quickie whenever the director was rehearsing a scene they weren’t in. They’d drift back singly so that no one suspected they’d been together, but the leading lady, an old movie star from the days when European divas were all the rage, had them figured out from the get-go. “Somebody’s been fucking,” she’d sing out, sniffing the air, when either of them walked into the green room. Getting caught was almost as much fun as the sex.

  Herbie closes his eyes and lets his chins drop onto his chest. He has a few different scenarios for getting to sleep. Either he thinks about all the different girls he’s had sex with—any kind of sex—starting with the first breast he ever touched and the girl who was attached to it—Judy Fritchen, who, at thirteen, had an intricate set of rules about what could be played with and what couldn’t. Or he goes through various sports moments that he had when he was still limber—the key moments, like a highlight reel. Or—his favorite fantasy—he thinks back to when he was a spy in the Second World War, working with the French Resistance. He had been trained to kill with his bare hands in a matter of seconds. He received this training when he was working with the British commandos and the Free French in England. His fluency in French and German was why they first approached him—and his background as an actor, of course. They trained him to master every conceivable weapon. He not only became a crack marksman, but he learned to take the various guns apart and reassemble them in a pitch-dark room. He learned hand-to-hand combat, knife techniques, parachuting, scuba. He could blow bridges. He had been dropped into Brittany and hidden by partisans in a farmhouse until he was ready to make his way into Paris with a new identity and passport—that of an automobile parts salesman from Dijon. The farmer’s daughter, a radiant, natural, piquant beauty, came every night to his straw bed, hidden in the barn, but she was still a bit too young; there are rules about these things. Perhaps after Paris, after he’d assassinated the Gestapo chief and stole the top-secret files, she’d be just old enough.

  His snoring wakes her. Annie’s eyes blink open and she sees him slumped in the chair with his head at a horrible angle and his mouth wide open. He could wake the dead, she thinks, and she smiles. He would like that joke. The pain drip makes everything an effort—to see, to hear, to talk, to breathe. But she shakes her leg out from under the covers and pokes him with her toe. No answer. So she pokes him harder until he stirs. He looks around for a moment and when he remembers where he is, he lets out a big sigh.

  “Yeah. This fucking place,” Annie says. He nods and rubs his eyes.

  “Where was that hotel?” he asks, still half dreaming. “Outside Saint-Tropez—where I had to sleep in the bathtub?”

  “Ramatuelle. That hotel was good, actually. I slept really well.”

  “I was passing a kidney stone.”

  “Yeah, but the hotel was nice.”

  He reaches out
to hold her hand. “Why’d you wake up?”

  “You snored.”

  “Fuck me,” he shrugs. “Like life.”

  “Just like life.”

  “You need your little sound machine. I’ll bring it.”

  Herbie pulls the chair over. Annie gestures him onto the bed. They hold hands for a while.

  “How’s the drugs? Need more?”

  She shakes her head.

  “I’ll take a hit if it’s going around,” he says.

  “Did you go to a bar?”

  He nods and grunts.

  “Did you get drunk?”

  “No,” he says. “Can’t.”

  “You’re going to have a headache. Take some aspirin.”

  “You worried about my health?” He kicks his shoes off and crawls in beside her, careful not to disturb the drip. “Try to sleep some more.”

  “No,” she says. “I like this.” They shift around to get comfortable.

  “Put your leg where I like it.” He does. They know this position. They’ve carved it in the stone.

  “Are you going to be mad at me when I go?” she asks.

  “You’re going?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck that.”

  They lie there in quiet for a long time, chewing it over.

  “We leave each other all the time,” he says. “We leave each other a thousand times a day.”

  “Yeah; different.”

  They think about all the times they’ve left each other. Herbie starts to rub his thigh between her legs.

  “You leave every time after we make love,” she says. “You go away.”

  “You hate that.”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “That’s actually different.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “It’s more like a meditation. It’s the only time I’m truly calm. I go into a kind of alpha state.”

  “You’re snoring away like a lumberjack. Meditation my ass.”

  They start to laugh softly together. This is too good, he thinks. I’ll never have this again.

  “There was a gorgeous girl at the bar. The bartender.” “Tell me.”