After Annie (9781468300116)

by Tucker, Michael

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE NEXT NIGHT, THE BAR IS A LOT MORE CROWDED. Must be a weekend or something, he thinks, as he pushes through the door. The day has been brutal. Some close friends came to visit the hospital and one after another, they fell apart like five-dollar umbrellas. So, of course it was up to Annie to make everybody feel better—which she did in great style. But once they were gone she crashed like a kite. She doesn’t have much left.

  Herbie heads to where he sat the night before. He sets himself up in the last seat against the wall with three empty stools to the other side. If he could get away with it, he would put his coat over his head. He perches and watches his bartender earn her money, working the crowd, humping drinks like a pro. She never looks his way—he’s watching carefully—but then out of nowhere, a double vodka rocks gets plopped down in front of him.

  “Hang around awhile,” she says. “I have something to tell you.” And she’s gone before he can answer, off to make fifty more cosmopolitans.

  “I’ll hang, I’ll hang,” he says and he kills half the drink in a swallow. The vodka feels good tonight, hitting all the right spots.

  If anything, she’s better-looking than last night, he thinks. Maybe it’s the hustle and bustle but she seems rosier, lit up like the business end of a joint. Herbie sits and appreciates her, mostly getting the view of her back, which is also not a bad thing.

  Thank God, he says to himself, I’m old enough to know that I don’t want to fuck her. That takes all the pressure off. She’s too young, anyway. Way too young. There’s a cutoff. I mean, please. And young girls, frankly, are not so great in bed. They’re always showing how good they do stuff. When you show, you don’t feel. Young girls are years away from knowing that. I don’t have to have sex with her—I can just appreciate her and take in all her energy and catch a whiff of her. She’s gorgeous and she brings me booze; why would I need anything else?

  But if by some rare occurrence, he argues, some arcane, oddball thing—like she gets this tropical disease that can only be cured by having sex with an old, sagging, Jewish alcoholic— would he? To save her life?

  He’s smiling now. He polishes off the drink with another prodigious gulp and puts the glass down on the bar with just enough sound to let her know he’s dry. He shakes his head and starts laughing—inside to himself, but plenty is showing on his face.

  Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, Herb? Who are you trying to bullshit? Given half a chance, you’d be on this girl like a Yorkie in heat. Given the slightest hint of encouragement, the tiniest crack of an opening and you’d be on your knees, begging. Who do you think you’re talking to here, Mary fucking Poppins?

  Later, after the bar has cleared some, he sits and waits for her to come his way. She’s been keeping his glass topped up. Tonight the vodka works. He’s fairly numb.

  “I know who you are,” she says when there’s finally some space.

  No you don’t, he thinks.

  “I googled you. And your wife, too—God, she’s so amazing. I didn’t realize you two were married. And you’re right; she’s way more beautiful than me.”

  Herbie nods.

  “What’s it like working with your wife?”

  Oh Jesus Christ, he thinks. If one more person asks me that stupid fucking question, I’m going to run screaming into the night.

  “She wants to meet you,” he tells her.

  “What?”

  “I was telling her about you last night.”

  “You were?” She can’t make her face hide the fact that she’s pleased.

  “Yeah. I told her I met a girl in a bar who has a face from an Italian painting and I flirted with her.”

  That red smudge again on her cheek. “What’d she say?”

  “That she wants to meet you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She gonna beat me up?”

  That makes Herbie smile, “I don’t think so. She asked me to tell her what you looked like, so I did.”

  She stares at him with question marks in her eyes. “What’d you say?”

  “That you’re very young.”

  She holds up a finger and rushes down to the other end of the bar, where it’s getting busy again. It must be Saturday fucking night, thinks Herbie. He watches her play catch-up, closing some people out, refilling others. He suddenly doesn’t feel like drinking anymore. Maybe he’s hungry. He has no idea what he is. He waves to her and makes the international gesture for menu and after a while she brings him one.

  “I’ll bet I’m not as young as you think I am.”

  “Oh yeah? How not young are you?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  This surprises him. “So there’s virtually no chance that I could be your grandfather.”

  She smiles. “No, I can actually give you irrefutable proof that you are neither one of my grandfathers.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She shrugs. “Olive.”

  “Olive,” he says, as if he’s about to eat her. “Olive, I would like a cheeseburger, medium rare with fries.” He takes a breath and lets it out. “And then I have another, slightly strange request.” He holds up his hands in a defensive posture and makes a face like “Don’t think I’m too weird.”

  “Oh God.” Her cheeks dimple up a little. “Like you want to me dress up in a costume and say mean things to you?”

  “What’s strange about that? No, Annie, my wife, asked me to ask you if you would come by to meet her. After you’re done with work.”

  “Why doesn’t she…?” Then she stops and cocks her head to the side.

  “Is she up at Mount Sinai?”

  He nods and stares her down. Smart girl, he thinks. She’s got it all figured out.

  “Is she gonna be okay?”

  He thinks for a moment about whether to get into this with her. Finally, he indicates that no, she’s not going to be okay. The girl’s face looks like she just got smacked hard. She’s stuck for what to say. Herbie reaches across and squeezes her arm. He wants to make it okay for her.

  She starts to tear up. “She was amazing.”

  “She still is.”

  The girl nods, contritely. “She wants to see me at the hospital?”

  He nods.

  “Sure,” she says, very unsure.

  “And never mind about the cheeseburger. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He pulls out some money and puts it down on the bar. “I’ll leave your name at the desk downstairs. We’re in 1032.”

  An hour later, he and Annie are hard into a game of Scrabble on her bed—the travel version that doesn’t spill the letters all over the place. Annie is kicking the crap out of him as always. He’s behind by forty points and he’s desperately trying to find a way to use all his letters so that he can get the big bonus. After a long wait, he lays down a word and turns the board around so she can see it.

  “What’s that?”

  “Pobbledy,” he says, nonchalantly.

  “As in what?”

  “As in, ‘That is without a doubt the most pobbledy thing I ever heard.’”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Be very careful—if you challenge and I’m right—pobbledy, by the way, is strewn through Samuel Johnson; he used it all the time—then you blow your lead.”

  “Challenge.”

  “Think carefully before you act.”

  Annie glances over Herbie’s shoulder, toward the door and smiles. “Hi, Olive,” she says. “Come on in.”

  She came, thinks Herbie. Good for her. In this light he can see that Olive is indeed not a child. There’s a sharpness in her eye, an alertness for what might be coming at her, like a boxer moving in. But he also thinks she’s one of those girls who’s only going to get more beautiful.

  “Herbie was just leaving,” says Annie, holding her hand out for him. He takes it and kisses her softly on the lips.

  Okay, he thinks, Herbie is leaving again. I get it—I’m no fun to have around—
I’m chronically morose, I need a shower, I cheat at Scrabble—get this fucking guy out of here. It’s good, he thinks, the girl’s going to give Annie a better night than I could at this point. They have no history. There will be no regret on Olive’s face for the Annie that used to be. On his way to the door he touches Olive’s arm.

  “So what, you listen to every drunk that comes into your bar with a crazy proposition?”

  She laughs.

  “Let her get some sleep.”

  “I will. I’ll just sit here; we’ll be fine.”

  As he gets his coat on, he feels that charge in the air that girls have when they get the guys out of the way—probably the same charge they felt when they were nine years old and doing a sleepover. He feels completely excluded, as he always does in this situation. More than excluded; rather like he’s a different species altogether, without any of the same DNA— like a cat trying to understand a horse—“Hey man, why do you let them get on your back like that?” He doesn’t feel any jealousy, which is strange for him. Maybe he’s dead, he thinks; that might explain it.

  On his way out he asks the night nurse to check the pain drip. She comes in and ups the flow a little and asks Annie if she wants her bed refreshed and Olive says that she’ll do it. She slips right into nurse mode, re-doing the bed around her so that it’s all smooth and wrinkle-free. She gets some fresh water into Annie’s glass and turns the lights down. She’s taken care of people before.

  “You want to change your nightgown?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  They take each other in. Annie senses people, so she just sits there for a moment.

  “Thanks for coming,” she says finally.

  Olive nods. She, too, is feeling a charge between them. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you want to meet me?”

  “Pretty strange, huh?

  “I guess.”

  Annie’s eyes fill with tears. “I’m worried about my husband. About Herbie.“

  Olive waits.

  “So I had to meet the girl who got him breathing again.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m terribly afraid…” The tears now release down her cheeks. “One of us has to survive this.”

  “No, he’s… he’s still breathing.”

  Annie leans back into her newly plumped up pillows and crosses her hands over her tummy. Her eyes are clouded by the morphine. “So, heavy metal, huh?”

  Olive smiles. “No, I’ve never sung heavy metal. I just said that to your husband because he thought he was being so cool. I wanted to see the look on his face.”

  Annie gets a kick out of this. “So he was feeling a little frisky, huh?”

  Olive blushes.

  “What do you sing, Olive?”

  “I trained classically—you know, for the opera. But now I’m mostly thinking about musical comedy. I’ve done some shows— summer stock, stuff like that.”

  “Would you sing for me?”

  “Sure. Sometime.”

  “I don’t have some time.”

  “I can’t sing here. I don’t have… I mean, we have to be quiet, don’t we?”

  Annie shrugs.

  “How about… I have my last singing lesson on my iPod. Do you want to hear that?”

  She digs into her backpack for the iPod and puts the earphones on herself. “Let me adjust the volume for you.” She listens. “This is the warm-up; you definitely don’t want to hear that.”

  Then she puts the earphones gently on Annie’s ears.

  In a whisper, “‘O Mio Babbino Caro’—Puccini.”

  Annie closes her eyes and listens, a tired smile on her face. Then she removes the earphones and looks at her for a long moment.

  “What happened, Olive?”

  Olive tenses.

  “You’re thirty-four?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you work in a bar?”

  “It’s my uncle’s bar. He’s kind of helping me out.”

  “Tick tock, Olive.”

  They look at each other.

  “Tell me,” says Annie. Her voice is tired.

  “What?”

  “Tell me the story of the exquisite singer who’s tending her uncle’s bar. I need to hear your story.”

  “I didn’t… I don’t want to talk about me.”

  “Sure you do.” Annie smiles at her.

  “You should rest. I’ll just sit here.”

  “Come on, sweetheart, don’t make me pull it out of you. I don’t have time.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  Annie appraises her for a long moment.

  “Shall I tell you what I see in your face?”

  A shiver shoots up Olive’s spine. She looks into Annie’s eyes, which are suddenly clear and blue. “Okay,” she says.

  “You give yourself up. To everybody. And you’ve been doing it for such a long time, you don’t know any other way to be.”

  “Give myself up?”

  “You sell yourself out; you take the short end. Again and again and again. And you’re so angry about it, sweetheart, it’s choking you.”

  “You don’t know me. You can’t say that.”

  “Oh, I know you. I know you like I know my own skin.”

  Herbie decides to sleep on the couch, the bedroom being too depressing. The whole apartment is an alien, hostile place. He puts a pinch of marijuana into his hash pipe, lights it and takes the whole little bowlful into his lungs and holds it there. That’s all he needs—Herbie, the one-hit wonder. He exhales, lays his head on the pillow and tries all his tricks—the old girlfriends, the French Resistance—forget it, not tonight. He’s never been more tired and he’s never been further away from sleep. He gets up and walks around the apartment, naked as a baby, looking at all the shit they’ve collected, the art, the tchochkes, the books. They pared down when they moved back to New York. They sold a lot of the art—all the expensive stuff they bought at auctions when the money was pouring like wine—a Picasso drawing, a large Paladino, a tiny Vuillard, a whole series of lithographs by Rufino Tamayo. They sold all that and kept their artist friends’ paintings, most of them bought in the old days when they—and the artists—didn’t have a pot to piss in.

  Most of their books are gone, too. Who’s got room for books in a New York apartment? You can have books or you can have a bed, take your pick. But they kept old scripts of plays they were in and he starts to go through them. Some go back to when they were in college, before they knew each other. Annie did The Visit when she was at Yale. The old Evergreen paperback script has her lines highlighted in yellow and her notes to herself in the margins. Diligent even then. He finds the script for the pilot of their TV show. Annie didn’t want to do it; she thought TV was crap. But she came around eventually and they did the show and got rich and bought all those expensive paintings. And then the show ended and they got poor again and they sold the paintings. Who gives a shit, he says. Naked I came in and naked I go out. He gives his body a look and raises his eyebrows. He jiggles his package a little but there’s no one home, so he decides to get dressed and take a walk. I’ll walk until the sun comes up, he says, then I’ll get a coffee.

  It takes Annie nearly until dawn to get Olive to admit that her mother is not, in fact, her best friend. Once they clear that hurdle, the rest of the story tumbles out of her like a jackpot payoff in Reno.

  “My dad died this year,” says Olive, her tears now coming pretty much nonstop. “And… I don’t know, it just threw me. I didn’t even know he was sick. And then my singing… I couldn’t sing anymore. I couldn’t get breath.”

  “Were you close to him?”

  “No. I mean, we were—but then he left us when I was fourteen and I wasn’t allowed… to love him after that. My mother needed me to be for her.”

  Annie waits.

  “I came home one day after my singing lesson. It was winter and dark out already. I walked into the living room and they were si
tting there with all the lights off. My mom was on the edge of her chair with her head tilted a little to one side, like she was made of wax. My dad was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his face all wrinkled with worry. ‘Your father’s leaving us,’ she said. ‘For his secretary.’

  “You know that mailbag that hangs on a hook at the railway station? It’s just hanging there, blowing in the breeze? And then a train comes by and it’s gone? Just like that.”

  Annie nods.

  “He had courted me against my mom. My dad and I were in cahoots. We made fun of her behind her back—about how pretentious and arty she was and how she misused big words. And when he confided in me like that, I felt… so special, you know? My mother knew it, too. Oh my God, she was so furious. And the angrier she got, the more she drove him away.

  “He hugged me the night he left. It was so… fierce; it pulled all the wind out of me. I could feel how much he loved me.”

  “You couldn’t go with him?”

  “She would have died. I know she would have. He knew it, too. He left me there for her. That night she was lying on the kitchen floor, shrieking and moaning; I didn’t think it was ever going to stop.”

  “So you took care of her.”

  “Yeah, she said I was her rock. Still am.”

  “Do you love your father or do you hate him?”

  Olive shuts her eyes tightly, but the tears find their way out.

  “I don’t know. He’s dead now.”

  “It’s no fun to be a rock, Olive. Rocks don’t shine.”

  Olive just looks at her.

  “How dare you shine? Does that about sum up your life, Olive?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHEN CANDY COMES IN EARLY THE NEXT MORNING and sees Olive in deep discussion with her mother, she knows exactly who she is. She doesn’t know her name or where she came from or how she got here, but she knows that this is the new girl, the new pretty girl. There’s been a string of these girls going all the way back to her babysitters when she was a kid. She grew up and grew older but the babysitters always stayed around the same age until eventually they were younger than she was. They weren’t all babysitters, of course. They were au pairs, secretaries, personal assistants, exercise coaches, and meditation teachers. Then, after Candy went off to college, they were cranio-sacral masseuses, past-life regression therapists, and tantric dakinis, but they were always around thirty-five and they were always great-looking.