The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  So it was the same party as always, except of course that Martin was there. He—like most of us—was dressed in Yankee blue: a light blue polo shirt and light blue pleated shorts and blue socks, even, and he looked very much like an oversized Catholic school boy in uniform. People regarded him warily. We’d all the seen the same movies, after all, the movies in which the menacing stranger comes to town and tears the community’s fabric, and so on. After Martin’s performance at the Yardleys’ April Fool’s party, one couldn’t be blamed for imagining that Martin would get drunk again and tell the jokes he shouldn’t or dance on the drinks table or ogle the women in their ripped bodices or jump naked into the above-ground pool and generally rend us from the safety of our costumes and themes and be the overall bad wind that blew our doors shut and made us lock them behind us. Which is precisely why we moved to Shady Oaks: So that we wouldn’t have to lock our doors, so that we could forget that there might be a reason to lock them and that the reason was us.

  Martin didn’t do any of this. He didn’t drink more than one commemorative plastic Battle of Gettysburg tumbler of Kentucky Gentleman bourbon, and he laughed politely when people joked about Johnny Reb this and Minie Ball that, and was perfectly agreeable to his hosts—he didn’t make any drunk-driving jokes, for instance, which was good because Bill had once gotten tanked and then plowed into the side of a school bus back in Cherry Hill, and a couple of the kids were in ICU for weeks because of it and he’d lost most of his family’s deodorant-soap fortune in the lawsuits that followed. No, Martin didn’t say anything out of the ordinary and the party ended without incident of any kind. I even went up to talk to him right as the party was winding down. I could feel Lily’s stare on my back as I extended my hand, introduced myself, apologized for not knocking a hello on his door and for being such a negligent neighbor.

  “Don’t fret,” Martin said. “We have plenty of time to get to know each other.”

  “You should come over sometime, maybe some evening,” I said. I waited to see a flicker of recognition, of guilt, of knowingness. But there was nothing. “For a drink or something,” I said.

  “I’d like that,” he said. That was that. We shook hands and I went back home with Lily. Even Lily had to agree that Martin seemed perfectly fine, perfectly nice, and we fell asleep that night with our arms around each other, as in the days of old, me breathing through my nose as I’m prone to do, Lily smelling good, of the dirt she tilled and the soap she washed it off with.

  It was three o’clock again when a noise woke me. I sat up in bed. Lily was still asleep; clearly she hadn’t heard anything. It was a different noise this time—a banging of something hard on something hard—and it was clearly coming from inside the house. It was Martin, of course, and of course I knew this, or suspected this, but I wasn’t thinking of him: I was thinking of Amy Vincent. I was thinking of the hushed conversation we had the next day at work after we’d done what we’d done—first under that sickly yellow Buffalo streetlight, then in my car, then at her apartment. We both said how sorry we were, how very wrong it had been. “Poor Lily,” Amy said, because they knew each other, had had several friendly conversations at Christmas parties and staff picnics.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I know you love her,” she said. “I know you love your kids.”

  “It’s true,” I said, because it was, and the fact that I hadn’t acted like I loved them seemed worse to me at that moment than not loving them at all, not loving them ever.

  “I’m not a bad person,” she said, and I nodded, because she wasn’t.

  “So that’s it,” she said. It was a statement, not a question, and I agreed with her—we even shook hands on it—which was why neither of us could understand how we ended up in the same bar the next night, talking the same sharp, flirting I-dare-you patter; couldn’t understand why we were then holding each other under the same sickly yellow streetlight; couldn’t understand how, back at her apartment, we’d let ourselves do what we’d sworn not to do; couldn’t understand the fear we felt as we lay in her bed, whether the fear had brought us together in the first place, or whether we’d made it ourselves. And now, more than a year later, I couldn’t understand why I was thinking of all this as I was—with shame, sure, but also a little bit wistfully.

  You can only think this kind of stuff for so long, and then you have to go confront the noise that made you think it in the first place. I got up, went downstairs. Martin wasn’t in the entryway, so I walked down the hallway, into the kitchen. Martin was sitting at the table. The clunking noise had stopped, but there was a big red circle on his forehead, and so it was pretty clear that what I’d been hearing was skull banging on pine.

  “Martin, do you know you’re in my home, at my table?” I asked him. When he didn’t answer me, I said, “Tell me what hurts, Martin. Does it still hurt?” He was still wearing his union blue, again with a bathrobe over it; he had that same blank, gray look from the last time he’d broken into our house. It still wasn’t clear whether he recognized me, whether he’d even heard or understood my questions.

  “What is my problem?” he said. “What is wrong with me?” And once again, he got up and walked out the door.

  *

  Over the next month time became liquid and awful. One moment I was eating dinner with my family, awash in their good company and the slow dawning of Lily’s forgiveness and the bounty of vegetables from her garden; the next, it was three in the morning and I could hear Martin banging around downstairs and I was remembering Amy, remembering what it felt like to touch someone new for the first time—which was about sex—and then to touch them a second or third or fourth time—which was about something else, something private and more complicated and terrible and closer to love.

  One moment we were all four at the Palmetto Primary School play, grinning through the local fifth-grade Annie screeching about her hard-knock life; the next, it was three in the morning again and Martin was moaning on the couch downstairs about his hurting heart and I was thinking about the time I’d crept into Peter and Eric’s room after I’d come back from Amy’s too late at night, how I said to them, very softly so as not to wake them, “Save me. Please save me.”

  One moment it was Lily’s birthday, her thirty-fourth, and I made her a cake, the frosting sugary enough to make your teeth scream and beg, and she kissed me on the cheek for the effort, right on the cheek, which you wouldn’t think would be something more and better than a kiss on the mouth but was; and the next moment, it was three in the morning and Martin was on the enclosed patio, crying softly and asking, “Are you there? Oh please, where in the hell are you?” Then, once he left, I got on the phone and called Amy Vincent. It was three o’clock in the morning back in Buffalo, too, and she wasn’t happy to hear from me, but the lateness of the hour didn’t have much to do with her unhappiness.

  “I knew you’d call,” she said.

  “You were right,” I whispered.

  “Speak up,” she said.

  “I said, ‘You were right.’”

  “I wish I wasn’t,” she said. Amy was talking about the past, of course, and about how in it she told me she loved me, she did, and I told her I loved her, too, but that I’d that very morning confessed to Lily and promised her never, ever again and so things were likely to be impossible for a good long while and (and this is just one of the things I’m ashamed of) wouldn’t Amy be happier applying for a transfer out of admissions, maybe into human resources or fundraising or some such friendly far-flung division at the U of Buffalo? Goodbye, was what she said then, and she was saying it now, too.

  “Don’t you ever think of me?” I asked.

  “I’m not even thinking of you right now,” she said, and then hung up.

  The next morning Lily found me sitting at the kitchen table on which, weeks earlier, Martin had used his head as a mallet. Her birthday cake was in front of me, half eaten and wrapped in cellophane and, a day removed from its purpose and in the full morning light, loo
king not like something meant to be eaten but to be thrown away, and quick. Lily did just that, then walked back to the table and regarded me. I’m sure I looked how I felt—hollow and guilty and unclean—and she said, “I think I know you,” and went out to her garden, which needed her.

  *

  There had been parties during these days and weeks, of course, and Martin had been breaking into our house only after one of the parties, and at these parties I discovered that he’d been breaking in to my neighbors’ houses, too. Who knows what in the parties prompted Martin to do what he did, because at the parties themselves Martin was as dependable and good-natured a guest as there is on this watery globe.

  At the Liddons’ May Day party, for instance, he dressed, like the rest of us, in a utilitarian denim getup that might have looked good on Chairman Mao. At the Greenes’ Cinco de Mayo shindig, he pretended to understand Ricky Greene’s gibberish fake Spanish, and took great pains to Ole! the Greenes’ mutt, Lola—who was made up as a bull, with cardboard toilet paper innards for horns—whenever she ambled by. And at the Pattersons’ Earth Day hoo-ha, he didn’t complain when he drew the short straw and was made to dress all in yellow and stand stock still as we—the party’s Earths with our attendant greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting industrial fumes—swirled around him, Martin saying to us, “Is it hot enough for you?” and “How’s your water table?” and “Is it hot enough for you yet?” as we orbited by.

  So Martin hadn’t done anything strange at the parties. Nonetheless, I knew he’d been breaking into my neighbors’ houses in the middle of the night, too. I knew this not because they told me, but because their eyes were as dark and scooped out as mine, because those eyes followed Martin around at the parties, looking for clues as to what he knew and didn’t know. What pains you so, Martin? we wanted to know. Who have you hurt, who has hurt you? Is it your family? Where are they? What have you done? What are you trying to tell us? How did we get so broken, Martin? And where can we find someone to fix us?

  That Martin was haunting my neighbors, too, also became apparent in the parties’ themes, which became something not to cling to but to distort, to stomp on and leave behind. For instance, at the Liddons’ May Day party, Ted Liddon—whose son had been a male stripper before committing suicide—began taking off his clothes as we sang “The Internationale,” getting all the way down to his yellowed jockey shorts before Cheryl, his wife, turned off the music and ushered him, weeping, into their bedroom. At the Cinco de Mayo party, Sasha Greene—who had a rage management problem, and who’d assaulted her elderly mother back in a Stamford nursing home—drank all the sangria, threw the dog’s fake bull horns at her husband and then kicked the dog itself over and over, sending it howling out into the backyard.

  And speaking of backyards, on Earth Day we smelled smoke, and so the whole party followed the smell outside and found Dave Patterson burning the normal party refuse—the paper plates and plastic utensils and the bottles and cans and even someone’s kid’s dirty diapers—in his backyard. Dave had been abused by a Catholic priest when he was a boy, and as the flames leapt and the acrid smoke poured heavenward, Dave was mumbling something that might have been a prayer, might have been an anti-prayer.

  As if conjured by Dave’s mumbling, Lily suddenly appeared across the fire from me. She looked like love, this was my exact thought. Because if love is not desire (which is what we’re always told) or the best part of us (which is what we want to believe) then love must be the memory of love and right then I remembered all the other times I’d seen Lily’s face golden and flickering across bonfires and campfires and accidental grease fires on the stove and I loved her very much, and it seemed possible—likely even—that this was the last fire that I’d ever see her through. I nearly shouted out something stupid and desperate right then, something that would have come out of my mouth sounding like, “Us! Us! We!” But I didn’t and she didn’t notice me standing there, or didn’t want to; instead, Lily stared deep into the fire, stared silently, seriously, fatalistically, as if she were staring not at the ashes of the party but at the ashes of us.

  *

  The last party worth telling about was at the Bellinghams’ and it had no theme. No theme! No costumes, no detailed invitations and instructions! There was no food, either. The Bellinghams only had cheap plastic handles of liquor and boxes of wine and case upon case of barely drinkable beer and bowls of Cost Cutter cigarettes scattered everywhere. There was music playing somewhere, music that spoke directly to the hips and knees and the other parts that make up our lower halves. Lily saw a group of women standing across the lawn, smoking cigarettes, and even though she hadn’t to my knowledge smoked a cigarette in a decade, she headed toward them, saying, “Goodbye, you,” to me over her shoulder.

  I drank one plastic tumbler of gin after another, wandered around in a daze. It was a real party, all right, the first one ever at Shady Oaks. Every few minutes someone tipped over backward in a chair. Lydia Olin was puking in the compost barrel, her husband, Thom, was pissing in the sandbox. Neighbors were dancing with neighbors, slowly, the way neighbors shouldn’t; men without dance partners were singing unironically into half-empty beer bottles along with the song, a song no one had heard in years but was either everyone’s favorite or least favorite. Victoria Lyons was crying out near the tool shed; she said she’d be all right in a second, but no one seemed to believe her.

  There was no pot, but there was a bong, and Miller Le Ray, the owner of the bong, insisted that you could get high on the resin, which wasn’t, he insisted, more than two years old. Jack Bellingham had found an old croquet set in his garage, and he was arguing loudly with Tee Morrison about the Rules of the Game. Lawrence Milettti was swinging one of the mallets wildly, spraying the balls into thickets of feet and shins. Martin himself was holding a whole bottle of bourbon and staring balefully at the wickets and the posts, which were leaning at illegal and unplayable angles. I was standing next to Martin, searching for Lily, who I was sure was in that group of women smoking cigarettes under the last oak in Shady Oaks. I couldn’t find her, but I did see Alexis Falvo.

  I’d known Alexis since we moved to Shady Oaks a year earlier. We’d attended the same parties; she was the one who, at her and her husband Benji’s Bastille Day party, had drawn a thin mustache on my face with a makeup pencil. I knew that she and Ritchie had had some marital problems back in Bristol, Rhode Island, something to do with not wanting kids or not being able to have them. She was kind and self-deprecating, I think I recognized that; I might have heard her laugh once, and her laugh might have been musical, might have been horsey. I was pretty sure she had once been a dancer, but then again she was thin and maybe she just looked like a dancer. Other than that, and like Amy Vincent, I’d never really noticed her.

  But I saw Alexis now, and she saw me, too; our eyes didn’t move from each other. There was a promise implicit in all this looking; if Martin came to our houses one more time, which he would, then we would no longer try to ward off the unruly world, then we would do exactly what all the relevant sacred vows said we should not do. If that happened, then her Benji and my Lily and my sons would leave us. Our lives would be over, I was sure of this. Then why would we do such a thing? Why would we hurt the ones we loved? I don’t know: There are no reasons good enough to be called reasons to explain what we were prepared to do. The only thing I can say is there are so many ways you can ruin your life, but this one was going to be ours.

  And then—and as I hear it now, this was a voice not of a particular neighbor, but rather all neighbors, the uberneighbor, the great porch-sitting busybody and diligent lawn waterer who cares not about our inner craggy canyons but about smoothing our surfaces—someone yelled out, “Martin, I think your family’s here.” Martin walked through the house and out the door and we all followed him. There were his wife and daughters, standing at the end of the cul de sac in front of their new house. Martin broke into a run down the street; he hugged them all, one by one, then all together.<
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  His wife started crying these great heaving sobs. Martin made shushing sounds. “Everything is going to be fine,” I heard him say this. Then the family turned to enter their house—first the daughters, then Martin, and finally, his wife, who I know now to be Eliza. Before shutting the door, Eliza shot a quick look at the depraved, scary bunch we no doubt appeared to be, then closed the door and locked it behind her.

  She locked the door! I could hear it, I’m sure all of us could hear the click and slide of the bolt into its hole. It was like hearing the hard truth for the first time. We could not stop ourselves from being ourselves. But we could offer up a small concession to our bad selves. We could lock our doors at night. That could be most easily done. And that is what we did. Lily and I found each other and the party dispersed and we locked our door that night and got some sleep.

  That was it. We lock our doors every night, now. Martin doesn’t come visit us anymore. The boys are doing well in school. Eden wouldn’t have been a patch on Lily’s garden. Enrollment numbers are good at the university. Alexis and Benji Falvos’ trips to the fertility clinic have paid off; they’re having twins. Martin and his family hosted a lovely Canadian Independence Day party just last week. Things are back to normal. Everyone here is happy.

  THE HERO OF QUEENS BOULEVARD

  by Michelle Richmond