by Josh Emmons
This was a moment of deep confirmation for Barry, who saw this as fate directly intervening in his life. To go from never having seen Shane before to meeting him randomly three times in the space of a week was uncanny. All great love stories featured coincidences leading the two protagonists to be together: A Room with a View, Shakespeare’s comedies, When Harry Met Sally. Barry felt this was preordained.
“Is your wife in the bathroom?” he asked.
“She’s at home,” Shane said and took a big sip of his drink and looked at the black man/white woman couple.
Barry wasn’t thrilled to hear that Shane was married, but this didn’t necessarily mean anything. There were sissynecks everywhere. “You couldn’t get a sitter, or …?”
“She wanted to stay home; I wanted to go out.”
“It makes sense you want to do your own thing. We all have to do our own thing sometimes or we go crazy, right?”
Barry could feel the twelve inches of empty space separating his left elbow from Shane’s right. He loved the doo-wop song playing and would have liked to sing along to it if Shane would only give him some encouragement, some signal that this was more than just two guys sitting at a bar, drinking swill. They could have looked into each other’s eyes and dueted. What a dream come true that would have been. A smile or a joke or even the neutral I-like-you-but-I’m-not-a-fag voice men used to disguise the possibility that they might be attracted to you, a voice that suggested a need to be defensive, a voice that implicated itself if you thought about it. Barry used to use the voice around his straight friends. If Shane used it, it would say so much.
The white woman stood up then and shouted at the black man to go to hell and she was crying and her shawl hung tenuously over the crook of her arm, the confrontational right shoulder thrust forward. The women at the adjacent table glanced over so inconspicuously that it was conspicuous and the break in their conversation spoke volumes and the white woman had to be oblivious not to feel their chigger eyes burrowing in. But Justine only looked at Prentiss.
“You’d like me to go to hell and every other witness I bet,” said Prentiss from his armless chair, his back to the wall, frowning at Justine’s rockslide fury, and the whole room could hear them, and he and she just didn’t give a fuck. “On account of you’re a cold woman with a battery-operated heart. So go on, now. Skedaddle. You probably got a ten o’clock waiting somewhere.”
A few seconds passed and Justine lifted her shawl up to her neck and, in a half-voice that everyone strained to catch, said, “Why are you saying this?”
“Just making conversation.” Prentiss said the words like they burned his throat. His features were set in clay.
“No, something happened but I’m not a mind reader and if you won’t tell me then I’ll go.”
“You’re trying to give us a last chance when we never had a first one.”
“That’s what you think?”
“I’m not stupid. You may think so but I’m not stupid. Get the fuck out.”
Putting her fingers to her cheek as though to check for a handprint, Justine left. The women stared at Prentiss and he stared back and they got uncomfortable and so turned away and quietly discussed what had happened like sportscasters analyzing the final round of a boxing match. Prentiss gulped down his water and pushed away the glass, folded his arms, and shook his head like he’d been in a bad car accident and was staring and marveling at the wreckage. Was that his severed leg on the hood of the car? And his eyes were tearing up and you would have said it was from the smoke in the bar, except that there was none. Rising he tipped over his chair, which he righted before walking to the counter.
“What can I do for you?” asked the bartender, rag in hand, bow tie on crooked.
Prentiss wagged his chin side to side and examined the halogen-lit bottles lined up in front of the wall mirror. “Double whiskey,” he said, and now tears turned to dewdrops in his eyelashes and he wiped them away; no one would see them fall. His hand shook a little—could be from the cold—laying a five-dollar bill on the counter. He regarded the whiskey before him like an offering. To hell or heaven, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was here and he’d just had a disastrous experience with someone he could have fallen in love with, and all this unnecessary pain had defeated his puny defenses, had led the armies of alcohol to stand poised at the gate, preparing their charge. Prentiss braced himself.
Shane was sitting two stools down from the nigger, who was a big son of a bitch and looked vulnerable and Shane knew that big black vulnerable men were to be avoided like angry mother bears. Now was a good time to send those drinks over to those ladies and then join them, and get away from the faggot at the same time. Lenora would give birth to and raise his children, and for this reason he would put up with a lot, but he wouldn’t put up with pattern behavior like hers today. If she pulled another stunt like this in the future, he’d bash down the bedroom door and shake her until sense dribbled back into her head, because he couldn’t afford—mentally or spiritually—the aggravation of her little rebellions.
“Hey,” Shane said to the bartender. “How about lining up a tray of tequila poppers for the ladies over there?”
“Yep.”
“You’re buying them all drinks?” asked Barry, whose voice was sticky and sweet and nauseating.
The door opened and Shane hoped it might be yet more women, but instead it was the faggot he’d had the run-in with at CalCourts— Jesus Christ what were the odds?—and now the jukebox was hopping with some crazy funk hip-hop “urban syrup” bullshit and the lights kicked down a few watts and the ladies in the corner talked louder. Things were really swinging now at the Ritz. Be-bop-a-lu-wah.
The glass was cold in Prentiss’s hand. He took a sip that his tongue absorbed like a dry sponge. Earlier that night he’d knocked on Justine’s door and she’d been ready to go, purse in hand, shawl pulled evenly over her shoulders, a dazzling smile that made Prentiss feel patronized and pitied. On the ride to dinner she did all of the talking while he grunted affirmation or made questioning “ohs?” and it became obvious that he was not paying attention to her words. But she kept talking and gesticulating and laughing at everything as they sat down at Mazotti’s and ordered water and fried mozzarella sticks. Then all at once she shut her mouth and looked at him questioningly and Prentiss felt her silence like an executioner’s hood pulled over his head. She asked if something was wrong and he paused for a minute and then said, as coldly as if he were in a Tennessee Williams play, “Wrong? What gave you that idea?” “You’re being very quiet, and I’m wondering if something’s bothering you.” “No,” he said, “everything’s spiffy. Tip-top. Maybe you’re taking your role too seriously.” “What do you mean?” “I shouldn’t say anything about that. An actor doesn’t break character till the curtains come down, right?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “That’s better,” he said, staring fixedly at her, his spine straight, summoning the will to cliff-dive.
Barry couldn’t have been less pleased to see Alvin just then, though he knew that it had to happen. They were supposed to meet at nine thirty, and here it was only nine twenty-two; Barry by rights should have had more time to talk to Shane, maybe to get his phone number through a pretext like could he borrow his power tools.
“Barry,” said Alvin, looking so happy to see him as he took off his windbreaker and squeezed Barry’s arm in lieu of the lip-to-lip slavering kiss that in a big-city boys’ town would elicit whistling approval but here would lead to a riot. “How was the swim?”
“Fine,” Barry said, and he felt caught, this relationship pinning him like a butterfly against life’s corkboard, when all he wanted was to flap his wings. “Alvin, this is Shane.”
“Oh my God,” Alvin said. In a loud whisper, “Barry, this is him, the guy who attacked me.”
“You’re joking,” said Barry.
“He’s not joking,” Shane said. This was one of the unluckiest nights of his life. This was the kind of n
ight to make you believe that evil forces controlled the universe.
“Let’s go someplace else,” said Alvin, who then noticed Prentiss and rushed over to him. “Prentiss! What are you doing? Jesus, what am I dreaming?”
“Alvin, my friend,” answered Prentiss. “Sit.”
“Prentiss, you can’t do this. This is someone else. This isn’t you.”
The glass of whiskey was empty. None had spilled onto the counter. Prentiss leaned forward steadily. His lips were moist and his eyes glassy. His thumb kept music time. With a delirious castaway grin he said, “I am many things.”
“What about last week when you stared down that whiskey?” Alvin looked like he’d found Romeo just as the vial dropped. “What about the last five months? That’s the Prentiss you want to be. You don’t want to give it all up for this. Oh, shit, Prentiss. Fucking hell.”
Prentiss’s face turned from clay to stone. “Leave me alone.” A clenched fist next to his glass.
Barry came over. “What’s going on?”
“This is Prentiss; he goes to my meetings. I’m his sponsor, remember I told you about him? And here he is.”
“Here I am,” said Prentiss. He swiveled around on his stool and looked at the three women in the corner who were talking about whether Pluto was a planet or, as some scientists claimed, simply a large icy rock. Except that he knew they were really talking about him, about how obvious it was that he was sick and alcoholic and black and doomed never to mend. Oh, people took such pleasure in seeing you fail to get better. They loved it when you fell back down. Because it would be too disheartening, wouldn’t it, if everyone recovered from their illnesses? Over whom would we then have an advantage? Others’ misfortunes were our private delight. We were so greedy for them; we were so covetous; we were so estranged from empathy that satisfactions we should have abhorred we instead relished. Prentiss felt a great welling up of disgust and rejection—yes, he’d tried to get along in the real world and forge friendships and do right by others and now he saw that it wasn’t working, it simply wasn’t panning out—and he thought that it was an insensitive God—it was a callous and frigid Power—that let him try so hard only to see all that effort, all that hope and aspiration, amount to nothing.
The three women in the corner got up and were leaving when the bartender brought them Shane’s prepaid tray of tequila shots. They refused the offer, saying they were late for a dinner party, but thanked Shane at the bar before leaving. The bartender set down the tray and went to clear their glasses. Shane stared after the women as if they were the last taxi out of a dangerous neighborhood. Prentiss demanded to know whose the untouched drinks were. Alvin tried to block them from Prentiss’s sight with his body.
“Hey,” said Prentiss to Shane. “You buy those?”
“Yeah,” said Shane.
“Let me have one I’ll give you top dollar.”
“Don’t,” said Alvin to Shane. “He’s in AA with me, and I don’t want him drinking any more. He’s having a bad night.”
“You stay out of it.” Prentiss slid off his stool and placed a menacing hand on the back of Alvin’s neck. “I can do what I want and if you try to get in my way …”
“What about your parole? If something happened and you got busted.”
“If what happened? This a threat, you threatening me?”
“No. Just take a minute to calm down.”
“Move now.”
Barry returned to his seat next to Shane and said, as casually as he could while whispering, “You didn’t attack Alvin because he’s gay. There was another reason, right? Because I have a feeling about you. Maybe I’m wrong. Tell me I am, but I don’t think so.”
Shane turned from the Prentiss/Alvin confrontation. The music was a leg-vibrating presence. Shane flexed his right arm and on his hand the veins rose like a relief map. And then for a moment his arm relaxed and his veins subsided and a more credulous cast came over his features and his face was soft like a weathered coin’s, his acne scars invisible. And there was plenitude and possibility. And Barry felt a wondrous complicity.
An old guy sitting next to Barry said, “I met you at the Longaberger party,” and Shane stood up swiftly and grabbed the back of Barry’s head and slammed it down onto the bar counter. Prentiss pushed Alvin away, drank a tequila shot, and moved to restrain Shane, who as soon as he was touched let go of Barry and said, “No problem here. It’s nothing. Nothing happened. Drinks are on me.” And Barry, shocked by how abruptly it all had gone down, rubbed his forehead, where a red band flushed into being just as the old guy sitting next to him disappeared.
10:10 p.m.
Around the table at the Jambalaya sat Steve, Sadie, Roger, Marlene, and Greg. Everyone was dressed in shades of black except Sadie, who in addition to her lavender blouse wore a buttercup sash like a ray of light streaking across their collective darkness. Steve looked at his colleague Greg and swirled a martini and thought sympathetically about Marlene, who loved Greg and mistakenly thought that she was the only woman in Greg’s life now that he was divorcing Elaine. Steve had always disapproved of his friend’s promiscuity and felt bad that Marlene would suffer for it. Steve was thinking that he shouldn’t let this deception go on, that he should say something, especially seeing Marlene so happy with Greg, seeing her territorial hand on his, the overlaid fingers, the comfortable slouch into his arm around her. Steve had never thought of other women when he was with Anne; he’d been constancy itself. Now he was alone and where was the justice? It was important that he end the charade of Greg’s tenderness, reveal the disgusting and specious nature of his relationship to Marlene. Steve’s body ached to do it. The Methedrine he’d taken had spread to a beautiful consistency in his bloodstream so that he felt possessed of great and important truths, with a manic street preacher’s need to proclaim them. Only someone with vision as clear as his could manage it. It occurred to him then that he should take Equanil to calm down a little, that maybe he was too wired.
Greg said something.
“What was that?” Steve asked.
“I asked what was going on with the case of your missing patient, Leon Meed,” Greg said. And then, for the benefit of the rest of the table: “A guy Steve treated last year for—what was it, torn meniscus?—went missing a couple weeks ago. It’s been on the news.”
“Eight hundred and fifty thousand people a year go missing,” said Roger. “You know how many of those cases the police and FBI solve?”
“Nothing new as far as I know,” Steve said, “but a couple people have reported that they’ve seen him. Or someone they think is him, so maybe he’s hiding out around here.” He couldn’t condone Greg’s faithlessness any longer. He had to take Marlene aside and tell her that Greg would never be the kind of man she needed, that Greg used people and didn’t understand the fragility of the human heart, didn’t know that it was made of glass rather than plastic.
“Why would he do that?” asked Marlene.
Sadie took a sip of wine and then with her thumb rubbed a lipstick smudge from the rim of her glass. Leon Meed was the name of her patient’s hallucination. What had happened in her bathroom had to be ignored because she was a rational person, committed to the real world and all of its certainties. She said, “I’ve heard that most missing people show up within a few months, and the others aren’t found because they don’t want to be found. They’re all tax dodgers and petty criminals.”
“One percent,” said Roger, with a television talking head’s earnestness. “All of one percent of missing-persons cases get solved.”
“The FBI is a government agency,” said Greg. “What do you expect? Except with the amount of money we pay in taxes you’d think they would try to earn at least some of their salary.”
Steve got a leg cramp and realized he’d been flexing his calf muscles. Why was he doing this? The people and tables and dance floor and performance stage of the Jambalaya appeared slightly jittery, shaking ever so much, like he could see their kinetic natures. Mo
vies were projected at the speed of twenty-four frames per second, which meant that you saw 1,440 still shots a minute. There was so much going on at a given instant. So much action and emotional nuance and subtext and overt movement. He might want to consider Equanil immediately. Roger’s right hand had only one finger, and he wore a leather holster over his fist that covered the finger socket scars. Steve noticed that it was a model from the early nineties. Two-tone leather. Tarnished brass snaps. And Marlene, a warm and generous and gracious person, shouldn’t be dragged deeper and deeper down by Greg to the point where, when she discovered what a duplicitous weasel Greg was, she’d drown. Steve started to say something and his mouth was so dry.
“What was that?” asked Greg.
Four expectant faces turned to him and they all were flat backdrops with bumpy noses and eyebrows and mouths.
“Nothing,” said Steve. He really needed to calm down, take an Equanil, have a bath and relax because he was feeling too aware for his own good. Nothing positive ever came from this much raw consciousness. It was as though he had been reduced to an alien brain of the omniscient variety from old science-fiction movies, blobs of cerebrum that scared you because they were the intellect of God but without God’s beauty. Or compassion. Just pure analytical matter. No, you didn’t want the brain of God divided from His handsome white beard and endless love. Oh, qua qua qua, no. Steve repeated, “Nothing.”
“Thought you said something,” Greg said, giving Marlene’s ear a playful twist that amused her.
Sadie looked at Roger and felt nothing in her heart or groin. It had been so long since she had been on a date, much less a blind one, that she had forgotten how they dragged on if you didn’t like the person. And how difficult it was not to show that you were having a bad time, so that an inverse relationship developed between your appearance and your feelings: the more bored you were, the more you tried to look contented. Adults pretended just as much as children did. Played just as many games. They even pretended they weren’t pretending and that their games weren’t about winning. Adults were weirdos. And what was going on with this Steve guy? Such a bouncy-bouncy. Looking around all wide-eyed and nervous. He had nothing to be nervous about. He didn’t face a ride home in Roger’s car and an awkward good-bye that needed to strike a balance between warmth and explicit indifference, a good-bye that communicated how it was nice to meet you but don’t call me again.