A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  Mr. Bryn said, “What’s your favorite color?”

  She said, “I don’t know. Purple, I guess.” She heard her voice being giggly and breathless, and she wanted to know what his favorite color was but didn’t ask.

  They had coffee in Father McGivens’s office, white china mugs, no cream or sugar.

  Father McGivens said, “So, Pattianne, where are you from?”

  “I was born in Reading, but we lived in Newark, and then Cranbury.”

  The cushion of the chair was old, red turning silver, turning pink, old velvet. Mrs. Bryn and Mr. Bryn sat together on a small couch. Mrs. Bryn crossed her legs. She wore black patent-leather heels that looked high-fashion, expensive, made her legs look long and sexy.

  “And your parents are there still?”

  She looked up then—this was all about her, she was supposed to be paying attention. She was on display.

  “Yes,” she said. “We used to go to Mass. I mean, we used to be Catholic.”

  Surely there wasn’t a stupider thing to say.

  Father McGivens leaned back in the desk chair and the wood squeaked. “Well,” he said. “I guess we can dispense with the secret code words then, can’t we?”

  He had a smiling face, and white teeth like Chiclets, and he sat back with one ankle crossed over the other knee, like a guy, except he wore his cassock. He said, “I have a cousin at Saint Francis in Cranbury.”

  “That’s where I was confirmed,” she said. “Right after we moved there. To Cranbury.” Claire was standing neatly behind her mother, and she bounced a little, and she touched one hand to Michael. He sent Pattianne the quickest, most secret look. It said don’t worry, so she didn’t. She just watched him unbutton his blue blazer and didn’t even think about how goofy those brass buttons were, and he leaned back in his chair and looked at Claire, and it was like the light from her face lit up his face, like their faces were laughing with each other.

  And that was all that happened. They all had coffee, and then they all went back out into the cold, the Bryns to their Bryn car, Mr. Bryn opening the door for Mrs. Bryn, his hand on the small of her back as she got in, and she and Michael to the Volkswagen, Michael opening the door for her.

  A tiny puff of warm air came out of the heater vent when Michael started it up.

  He said, “I told him you’ve been baptized.”

  She said, “I really like your dad.”

  She did, and she really liked saying it to Michael.

  Then she said, “When?”

  Michael held the steering wheel like he was wrestling the Volkswagen down the road.

  “When what?”

  “When did you tell Father McGivens I was baptized?”

  “Tuesday. No. Thursday. Last week.”

  It was not usually good to talk to Michael while he was driving.

  When they got back to her apartment, the first thing she did was peel the freezing pantyhose off and put on jeans. She only zipped the jeans partway up.

  Michael was spooning coffee into the filter.

  She put her arms around his waist. “How about some of that pinot noir?”

  He counted four scoops. She pressed against his back, that blue blazer, and slipped her hands into the front pockets of his pants.

  “So,” he said. “I talked to Father McGivens.”

  “I liked him,” she said. “Why do you always have paper clips in your pockets?”

  He turned around in her arms, took the two paper clips out of her hand and set them on the counter, and he took her hands in his and kissed her, holding their hands between them like that, and she reached her tongue into his mouth, and pressed her hips against him, pressing him into the counter.

  “He said,” Michael said, “no sex,” and he let go of her hands.

  She pulled him by the butt, pulled right up against him, against his hard-on.

  She slipped her hands down inside the back of his khakis.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she said, pulling his shirt out of his pants, undoing the shirt buttons, rubbing her cheek against the soft hair on his chest. She bit on his nipple, and when he made a sound in his throat, she heard it with her tongue. She unzipped his pants and he made sounds into her hair, into her ear.

  “I don’t have any condoms,” he whispered.

  “I do.”

  Then it sounded like he said they were supposed to disentangle.

  “Distentangle?” she said. “Who said that?”

  “Father McGivens.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  She ended up on the counter, whispering, “Yes, please,” Michael’s face between her legs.

  After, when they were sprawled on the couch, breathless and giggled out, she said, “We’re knackered.”

  “We’re what?”

  “Knackered. It’s a slang thing. English. This after-sex thing like you can’t move.”

  “Mmm.”

  “So, you think that counts as sex, as the kind of sex we aren’t supposed to have?”

  “Yes.” And he was laughing a little, but he had that dark blue look in his eyes.

  “Are you sure?”

  He said, “Well, I’m not going to ask.”

  “Listen,” she said. “We need to talk about this disentanglement thing. Because I’m not a Catholic, really.”

  His eyes closed and he said, “Well, you just be who you are.”

  The next day she called the clinic to get a prescription for birth control pills anyway. And as for Michael’s willpower, it was nil.

  She had lived with a boyfriend once before, David, a cute potter, and she wasn’t sure if her parents had even known. They must have. Michael was still paying rent on his apartment, but he was at her place all the time now. His shirts on hangers in the closet. His pillow, his shaving cream, his blue coffee cup.

  His parents didn’t know. His mother had suggested Sunday dinner twice, but Michael had had to work both Sundays, and Pattianne was relieved and disappointed at the same time. Once when Mr. Bryn was in town for something, though, he and Michael had met for a beer, and Michael called her and said she should come over, to the Bad Frog Brewpub. When she got there, she stood at the door for a second. There they were at a table at the far end of the room. Mr. Bryn saw her, as if he’d been watching for her, and he smiled and stood up. She got to the table and he reached out and guided her close with a hand on her back between her shoulders, that warm hand.

  “Hey there, Miss Pattianne. Michael was just telling me you can beat him at Scrabble.” He was laughing. “Well, I have to tell you, anyone can beat him at Scrabble.” And they were off on a story of Michael’s ten-year-old cousin beating him at Scrabble every time they played, and Mr. Bryn said, “You’ll have to play her.”

  Michael ordered Pattianne a glass of white wine. She never even finished it, just sat there. It was easy, their conversation wrapped around her like a sweater.

  “Melissa,” she said at work the next day, “do you ever go out for a beer with your dad?”

  “My dad drinks red wine.”

  “Okay, red wine.”

  “No,” Melissa said. “They drink at home.”

  This was how conversations with Melissa usually went.

  “He’s into war movies” is what Melissa finally came up with. “So, yeah, I’ll pick up a bottle of cheap red, and we’ll have one glass of that, and then he’ll open a bottle of good red and we’ll watch a war movie.”

  “War movies?”

  “Bridge on the River Kwai, ever hear of that one?”

  Valentine’s Day with Even-Steven had always been something to avoid. Michael gave her a white rose.

  Their first Valentine’s Day together, and no more talk of disentangling.

  Michael’s phone rang at almost midnight, out on the kitchen counter where it was plugged into its charger. He jumped out of bed. The ring was just like an old-fashioned telephone. Jen had suggested “Wild Thing.”

  Pattianne heard him answer, and she heard him say, “Oh my G
od.” She wrapped a blanket around herself and followed. By the time she got there he was saying, “No, I’m on my way.”

  “My dad,” he said to her. “He collapsed. It’s maybe his heart.” Then his face crumpled and he gasped for a breath. “They don’t know what, like a heart attack or what.”

  His tears hit her like a punch in the stomach.

  “Should I come with you?”

  He said no, and got dressed fast, and left without looking back at her, saying he would call her.

  She stayed up, the apartment getting cold by two when Michael still hadn’t come back. Or called. There were shadows in the corners, and she turned on all the lights, which didn’t help. She turned on the TV, too, and watched Casablanca for a while and then turned it off and tried to read Elmore Leonard, The Big Bounce, which she had already read twice, once quite recently. Sometimes reading something she had already read would help her fall asleep. Not this time.

  And he didn’t call.

  She fell asleep around six. He got back at seven.

  “How is he?”

  “He’s got fluid built up.”

  “In his heart?”

  The blanket was tangled around her legs, and she kicked it to the floor.

  Michael picked it up. “Congestive heart disease,” he said, and he smoothed the blanket out, folded it in half, saying, “Father McGivens said he hasn’t been feeling well for a while,” and then folding the blanket in half again and laying it on the bed.

  She pulled on knee socks. “Father McGivens was there?”

  “I have to go back. I have to call work first, and then I’m going to shave. I don’t have time to take a shower. Claire’s going to pick me up so we can drive up together.”

  “Claire is coming here?” The dishes were piled in the sink from last night. There were clothes on the living room floor, the wine bottle on the table, a row of empty wine bottles on the counter because she liked the shape, an odd curve, Gattinara, the way she had loved those old heart-shaped Mateus bottles.

  “Where is it?” Michael was standing in the bathroom doorway.

  “Where is what?”

  “You were going to pick up the dry cleaning from downstairs.”

  “Oh shit, I’ll go get it. They open at eight.”

  “That’s okay.” He closed the bathroom door.

  She started moving, fast, jerky movements—made the bed, grabbed up clothes and put them in the laundry basket in the closet, then out to the kitchen, the colander full of compost, the baking dish crusted with tomato sauce, the wine key open with the cork still screwed onto the corkscrew. She stood there in a pink T-shirt and purple knee socks. Pale winter sun came in through the window without curtains. The window was clean. She loved clean windows. She took a deep breath, blew it out like it was a cigarette.

  She turned the burner on under the tea water. She put on Concerto for Flute and Cello, left it playing softly, and went back into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of jeans. Michael came out of the bathroom smelling like shaving cream, and she was standing calmly at the dresser, brushing her hair. Calm. Her heart banging crazy.

  “What can I do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He pulled a T-shirt off the floor.

  “How’s your mom doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “He was gray. His skin was gray.”

  The kettle in the kitchen screamed.

  “I’m going to wait for Claire downstairs.” He put on a sweater. It went on inside out. “I’ll call you.” And he was out the door.

  Mr. Bryn’s good, good heart.

  His father’s eyes were oddly bright, and dark. They glittered. There was a thin shine of sweat on his forehead. There was a smell, chemical and sweet at the same time. It was the smell that scared Michael most of all.

  His father raised his hand a couple of inches off the sheet. Michael reached for it, but it dropped back down. There was a tube going in the back of it, taped there. The skin around the tape was stained dark yellow. It must have hurt. Michael touched the fingers. They were cold. They curled around his hand gently, and his father’s face flickered into a smile. Something white crusted at the corners of his lips.

  “Michael,” he said. His voice seemed normal. A little low.

  “Hey, Dad.” Michael heard his own voice, sounding small and scared. He had to get a grip. He cleared his throat.

  “How you feeling?” It sounded like he was bluffing.

  The machine next to the bed beeped softly. Out in the hallway someone laughed quietly.

  “Dad?”

  His dad’s eyes blinked. They looked straight up, only for a second, and then they closed.

  “Dad,” he whispered, his lips barely moving, his voice nothing, “Dad, what should I do?”

  A deep wet cough shook his dad’s chest slightly, and he said, “Are you thinking of marrying her?”

  “Who? Pattianne?”

  His father coughed the wet cough again and then nothing. His lips didn’t move.

  “Dad?” Michael said it so softly his father couldn’t possibly have heard.

  His father let out a breath. His body under the sheet deflated, but he just kept smiling, as if he simply didn’t have the energy to stop smiling. Father McGivens appeared next to Michael. He laid his hand on Michael’s shoulder.

  “Mike,” he said to Michael’s father, and Michael was shocked at the volume of his voice, so ordinary and loud. “I’m going to take this boy of yours. Dory’s turn.”

  His father actually laughed, a weak chuckle. The fingers on the sheet lifted and dropped. The heart monitor beep was even and steady.

  They went out, and Michael’s mother was waiting. She looked better than she had when he’d arrived. She’d washed her face and tied her hair back with a red scarf. She had on lipstick. Or maybe it was the red scarf. She hadn’t been crying. Nothing to cry about, she’d said, when Claire had gotten teary. He was going to be okay. He was very uncomfortable right now, and he was going to feel a lot better soon.

  “Congestive heart disease,” she said.

  She looked at a piece of paper. It was full of her neat notes in bright blue ink.

  “There’s no fluid in the lungs,” she said. “They have to do liver tests to make sure there is no fluid built up there. And kidney tests.”

  He had always admired her perfect handwriting.

  “There’s no edema. Swelling. So far. His hands and feet are okay.”

  Her fingers had gripped the paper as if it would save them all.

  Now he and Father McGivens stopped outside of his father’s room. The wide-open area of the CCU nurses’ station felt like the bridge of the starship Enterprise.

  He said to Michael, “There’s a prayer service this afternoon with the Family Life Leadership Committee. Your father is scheduled to read lay text.”

  They were stopped at the edge of the shiny gray floor, where it turned to blue tiles of a hallway. Michael felt himself pulled down the hall. He wanted to keep walking. He wondered if this was feng shui. He and Corrine had argued about feng shui. He said it was superstition. She said it was physics. He stepped onto the tiles, and Father’s hand landed on his shoulder, very gently, and even so, Michael startled.

  “Michael, are you all right? I know you haven’t had any rest, but joining us would be good, for you and your father, and for the others too.”

  “Yes,” he said. He had one foot on the blue tiles and one foot on the shiny floor, and that’s when he realized he had on dark dress socks and neon-green Adidas. “I’m sorry, Father, what?”

  “I can show you a text that will be appropriate,” Father said. He fell into step next to Michael and led him down the hall. “But even if you can simply lead us in the opening prayer, I think it would be important.”

  “Of course,” Michael said.

  He didn’t think she wanted to get married, but he couldn’t say that to his dad. That would make her seem like th
e kind of girl who’d live with a guy she didn’t want to marry. She wasn’t that way. She was just dreamy. Out there. Librarians were always spacey in real life.

  Father McGivens had said, “We’ll be gathering in the Marian Chapel.”

  Michael heard that, Marian Chapel, and he could feel his brain try to form a question. He tried to think what to ask. Where is that? What is that?

  Father had said, “The closed door at the side of the altar. Go on back. You’ll remember.”

  Michael didn’t remember. There were a few rows of pews. Light-colored carpeting. The windows were clear leaded glass, and it was dark out. The candles on the small altar were lit. If Pattianne were here, she would count the rows of pews. He stood at the back and didn’t know where to go. There were five rows. His father’s friend Brad, from the office, came in, and stopped right next to him, Michael’s hand out, shaking Brad’s, before he even knew it. More men came in. More hands shaking his. His father’s friends, asking how he was doing in low voices. They asked after his mother. Men who looked familiar even though he only knew a couple names—Jack who played golf, Pete who was a deacon. An older man who seemed a complete stranger shook his hand and placed a broad palm on his shoulder, and that touch stayed after the man went and sat in the second pew, next to Alex Gordon. Alex was his own age. They’d been altar boys together.

  Michael felt drawn into their presence. They gradually filled the pews.

  He was sweaty. He could smell his pits. He hadn’t taken a shower today. He’d been up since midnight. He’d been up since yesterday morning. He hadn’t taken a shower since he and Pattianne had made crazy love after their Valentine’s Day dinner and all that chianti, and then his mother called. He’d rushed to the hospital.

  Damn. He must smell like sex. Father McGivens was right there, and Michael took a step away. They were the same height, but Michael always felt small next to him. Father turned a bit. His eyes were bloodshot. He’d been there all night too. Michael felt again the rush of tears.

  “Sorry,” he whispered. “I’m kind of wiped out.”

  “Just the invocation of the Blessed Mother then, eh?” Father put a hand on his shoulder and steered him gently to the pulpit. It was wood, carved like it was lacy. He turned to the men. They all knelt. Father McGivens had gone back to the front pew, next to the guy who was the CYO coach. Basketball.