The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  Scott stamps his feet, trying to get warm. He will come back when it’s light and find a way to get into that yard. He will dig up that coffee can and find those tags. He will return what he has stolen, the piece of his father’s past he took. The dog tags are a magic amulet after all, and his father needs them for the journey he is on.

  He turns and heads up Greenwich to the D’Agostino’s. Inside it is warm and bright. There is produce from California, impossible plums and hothouse tomatoes. The colors are fat, saturated. He wanders the aisles trying to get warm. He would eat something but all the food is protected by cardboard, plastic. He is afraid of the crackle he would make breaking into the packaging, that grating, synthetic alarm. Ahead of him, a beautiful woman pushes a baby carriage and a shopping cart. She is wearing clogs though it’s the middle of winter.

  “Hi,” she says as he passes. “Sorry. Do you think you could—I’m trying to get those diapers off the top shelf.”

  She points. Scott stops. He feels as if she’s woken him from a dream. There is that same disorientation, that same dizzy recalibration.

  “This one?” he says, reaching up to grab a bag of Pampers.

  “Thank you so much,” she says. “Sometimes being short is a real bitch.”

  He nods, looks at the baby. It is bundled up for winter, swallowed by clothes, but peeking out are the most amazing eyes, these giant brown orbs. They stare up at him with wonder. He is hypnotized by them. He looks at the woman. She has the kind of beauty people describe as effortless.

  “What’s his name?” he asks.

  “Sam,” says the woman, lodging the diapers in the bottom of her cart. She is blonde, fresh faced. Any sign that she was ever pregnant has been erased. Now she is just another New York goddess in narrow, low-rise jeans.

  “I can’t really feel my face,” says Scott. “And I’m wondering, is it still there?”

  She smiles.

  “Still there.”

  He nods, waking up further, becoming aware of where he is. Now that he has a plan, now that he understands his mission, he feels brighter, grounded. He is no longer a lost little boy.

  “I just got off a plane from California. It’s like Alaska outside.”

  “They say it’s supposed to get worse,” she says. “A cold front from Canada.”

  She puts a box of baby wipes in her cart.

  “My husband’s from California. He goes there a lot. Where do you live?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “I love San Francisco. He’s from L.A. Home of the brown air. I hate it, but it pays the bills, so…”

  “And he left you here in the tundra? What kind of monster is this guy?”

  She shrugs. She seems more relaxed than any mother of a six-month-old has a right to be.

  “I don’t mind,” she says. “I was an only child. I get by just fine on my own.”

  Scott looks into her eyes. They are like her son’s, bottomless, welcoming. He wishes he could have a woman like this, effortless, self-sufficient. He thinks, If you would just put your arms around me for ten minutes, I could do anything. I could climb that fence. I could go to the memorial. I could drive to Maine and dump my father’s ashes.

  “I’m Scott,” he says, sticking out his hand.

  She pulls off one of her colorful, striped wool gloves, sticks out her hand.

  “Joy,” she says.

  Her hand is thin and warm. Her nails are pink.

  “Just so you know,” he says, “I don’t usually troll the baby food aisle looking for women.”

  “Hey,” she says, “we all have our fetishes.”

  “I’m usually more of a produce man. You can tell a lot about a woman by the way she picks a melon.”

  Joy smiles. She has a way of being that makes the room feel lighter.

  “So what brings you here?” she says.

  He thinks about this. The truth is like an avalanche. How do you tell a stranger about your life if your words are boulders and you don’t want to crush them under the weight?

  “I grew up near here,” he says, “on Bank. I don’t know why, but every time I come back to New York, I find myself outside the old house.”

  “Nostalgia,” she says.

  “Maybe. It just—it feels important somehow, you know, to go back to the source. To see where it all started.”

  “I grew up in Oklahoma,” she says. “My house is a shopping mall now.”

  “So you go to the Foot Locker,” he says, “maybe tear up in the ladies’ running shoe section.”

  She smiles again. He feels the ice melting in his bones. He is like a baby bird imprinting. Every woman he meets he looks in the eye, thinking, Are you the one? Are you the one? He thinks, If I could just stand here in the supermarket making this woman smile for the rest of my life, that would be fine with me. That could be my death moment, my eternity. He kneels and looks at the kid, Sam. He’s wearing little booties and a tiny wool hat. Snot is running from his nose. Scott sticks out his finger, lets the baby grab it.

  “My nephew is named Sam, too,” he says. “All the old-man names are coming back, Max, Earl…”

  “Earl?”

  “Well, maybe not Earl.”

  “Sam was my dad’s name,” says Joy.

  “My brother has three kids,” says Scott, straightening. “He sells pharmaceuticals in L.A.”

  “Huh,” she says, “so does my husband.”

  Scott puts his back to the baby food. All those bottles, rows and rows, all exactly the same, are making him nervous. Something about the number of days it would take to eat them all.

  “How do you do it?” he wants to know. “Decide to be a parent? It seems so…big.”

  She brushes the hair from her face. In a little black dress with her hair down and makeup on she could end a war. She could lower the moon.

  “It’s like everything else in life,” she says. “Sometimes you don’t decide. Sometimes it just happens.”

  He nods. The feeling has returned to his fingers and toes. He is pretty sure that he and Joy have very different luck. That her life is this charmed escalator ride, while he is forced to scale the outside of the building using just the pressure of his fingertips for leverage. He wishes that just once in his life he could know what that was like, the path of no resistance.

  “Well,” he says, “I should probably get back out there.”

  He buttons his flimsy coat. In his dreams she would tell him not to be silly. She would invite him back to her house and make him soup. She would give him a blanket and a towel and show him to the guest room. She would say, Stay as long as you like. You’ll love my husband. He has a way with people. But this is not the world we live in.

  “Thanks for the diapers,” she says.

  He nods, starts to walk away, then stops.

  “Would you promise me something?” he says.

  She frowns, her body stiffening. This is not something strange men are supposed to say.

  “What do you mean?”

  He sighs.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  He turns, then turns back.

  “Just—don’t stop. You seem so happy. Fearless, you know? Don’t stop.”

  She narrows her eyes, her New York radar kicking in. He wants to hold up his hand, to show her he is harmless, unarmed.

  “No matter what happens,” he says. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but it seems vital somehow that this woman, this young mother, not turn into his mother. That she not fall somehow into despair. “It’s—and I really think this—all in your attitude, you know? I mean, life’s hard and, I don’t know, things happen, and I just think it’s important to be strong. Happy. It’s so easy to give in to despair, to give up, but don’t. Please.”

  He is flushed now, feeling giddy, reckless. It’s like he’s exposing himself to her, this stranger, all his weakness, his fear. He is unburdening himself here in the disposable baby-care aisle, like some kind of lunatic.

  “Sure,” she says. “I promise
.” He can’t tell if she thinks he’s crazy or not, and in truth he doesn’t really care. All he wants is to connect, to feel human. He looks her in the eye. In a minute he will turn and walk back into the cold. In a minute he will hump his way uptown, teeth chattering, but right now all he wants is to feel like she sees him. So he looks at her and she looks at him, and for a split second he thinks she does, but, as always, time keeps going. The moment passes. Then they are strangers once again.

  “Bye, Sam,” he says and turns.

  “Wave bye-bye, Sammy,” says Joy, watching him go. The sound of her voice is so sweet Scott starts to cry. Nothing dramatic, just a few tears rolling down his face. In front of the sliding door he stops, puts up his collar. His reflection in the glass looks tired. He smiles at himself. You’re good, he thinks. You’re a good person. It’s so important to him that somebody thinks so. Then, hunching his shoulders in anticipation, he steps out into the cold.

  Fifteen hours after meeting Joy, he is on the corner of Sixty-seventh Street and Lexington levering his mother out of a cab. It is twenty-seven degrees in the sun. David has gone around to the trunk to rescue the wheelchair. He is smiling a smile that Scott has never seen before. Doris, too, is uncharacteristically bubbly this morning. If Scott didn’t know better, he would say she was actually in a good mood. She makes jokes as Scott and David help her out of the backseat, hoisting her by her scrawny, brittle arms. It is eleven-thirty on Friday morning. The sky is that frozen powder blue you see in David Hockney paintings. David rolls the wheelchair onto the sidewalk. Scott opens the door to the French bistro they’ve chosen (no stairs, not too crowded, and yes, they serve wine before noon).

  “I’m going to have a salad,” his mother says, “maybe a steak.”

  Something about the prospect of a civilized meal seems to have cheered her up. Scott feels relief. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. Maybe she’ll rally and the trip will turn out to be a renewal, a rebirth. Maybe after all these years of demanding and wallowing and lashing out, she can be his mother again.

  “Are you okay?” David asks him. “You look terrible.”

  Scott can only imagine what he must look like, wet hair frozen in stalks, eyes baggy and dark. A zombie, maybe. Some kind of mental patient.

  “I didn’t get much sleep last night,” says Scott. He has that hollow, jittery feeling that comes from sleeplessness. It is the kind of thing that coffee only makes worse. He wandered the city for hours after leaving the supermarket, plotting his ingress. He considered staking out his old home like a cop, waiting for the inhabitants to leave, then sneaking in and digging. He imagined ringing the bell and telling his story to whoever answered. At no point did he ever doubt that the dog tags would still be buried under that tree. He is on a quest, and quests are never fruitless. Walking the streets, he found himself fantasizing about single mothers and fresh vegetables. He was like Adam thrown from the Garden. Everything seemed hateful and filthy in comparison.

  The waitress shows them to a table in the corner. They help Doris into a chair and the waitress rolls the wheelchair into the back. Cousins Florence and Alice aren’t here yet. No one is. The restaurant is empty. Who eats lunch at eleven-thirty? Scott wonders as he and David slide into the booth. Old people, that’s who. The leather booth is soft and welcoming against his body, and leaning back, Scott worries that he will fall asleep before the menus come.

  “I had the most amazing night’s sleep,” says David. “I don’t know why. Something about being back in New York, the winter air. What about you, Mom? Did you sleep okay?”

  “I did, actually,” she says and smiles a private smile.

  Scott sighs. Why are they rubbing it in? He looks around at all the empty tables. They specifically chose this restaurant because it holds no memories. It is not a place Doris and Joe used to come. It is a neighborhood they never frequented. There are no ghosts here. No painful reminders. This is as close to neutral as it gets in New York.

  “I’ve given up on sleep,” he says. “I think it’s overrated.”

  “Well, I had the strangest dream,” says Doris. “We lived in the country and there were lobsters in the grass. What do you think it means?”

  “Maybe your oxygen level is too high,” says David.

  The waitress brings bread and a saucer of olive oil. Scott is so hungry he could eat a blimp.

  “Are you looking forward to seeing Florence and Alice?” David asks as Scott digs in.

  Doris shrugs, still smiling her secret smile. David smiles back at her. The two of them are grinning like idiots. Scott watches them, crumbs on his lip, bread half chewed in his mouth. Did somebody make a joke? He looks around. Did he miss something? They’re acting like the cat that swallowed the canary. It’s just mean, he thinks, to have a joke and not share. I could use a laugh. Are you kidding? Tell me something funny, for Christ’s sake.

  Florence and Alice arrive, shaking their coats as if to clear snow. They both live out on Long Island. Florence’s married to a dentist. Alice lives alone. Scott hasn’t spent that much time with them. His mother has an uneasy relationship with all her relatives. She hates them, in other words. Well, not hates them, but she is suspicious of them. What do they want? What’s their angle? She treats strangers with more respect. To Scott they are merely distant relatives, pleasant, but unaffecting. He has no idea they are really his mother’s sisters. Really his aunts. Nobody does. Imagine the surprise when the truth comes out.

  “Hi, hi,” says Florence, swooping in for a kiss. She is fifty-six, the glamorous one, overly made up, wearing fur. Alice stands behind her, the spinster in her mannish shoes.

  “Traffic was horrible,” she says.

  Scott stands, accepts an awkward hug. His mother is smiling her TV smile, that blank performance of cheer. She seems stronger today, much to Scott’s relief. Last night coming in from the airport he was half worried she was going to pull some kind of last-minute dramatic collapse—a swan song, Blanche DuBois swoon—something to draw the focus from her husband’s memorial. Something to place her firmly at the center of the world’s attention.

  Florence sits beside Doris, touches her arm, her face an approximation of concern.

  “How are you?”

  “How I am is an opera,” says Doris. “It’s Shakespeare.”

  Florence nods. She lives in Port Jefferson with her dentist husband. They have two children and a boat.

  “Well, you look good,” she says. “Doesn’t she look good?”

  Alice nods. She is looking Doris in the eye, her face measured and empathic. Lean on me, she seems to be saying. I love you. I’m here. The problem is, she’s not. The problem is, she rarely calls, and when she does she tends to talk about herself. It’s not that she’s a horrible person. Like everyone else, she’s just caught up in her own life. It doesn’t help that Doris is so negative all the time. Who wants to listen to that? This is the problem with chronic illness. It’s a slow-motion tragedy, and the closer you are to it, the more it takes over your life. Add a layer of removal, however, and the situation has the opposite effect. The sickness actually pushes you away. If you can’t give your everything to it, if you aren’t willing to be on call, then what can you really contribute? We all have lives, jobs, families. Everybody’s good in a crisis. We drop everything, race to the hospital. But what do you do if the crisis lasts seven years? When do you get on a plane? How many times a month do you call? Once, twice, never?

  So Florence and Alice try to fit all the time they should have been there over the last seven years into this one lunch.

  “I’m just so sorry,” Florence tells Doris.

  “We both are,” says Alice.

  Florence clucks her tongue, pats Doris’s arm.

  “Maybe,” she says, “and I don’t mean to be callous, but maybe it’s for the best. I mean, he suffered so much.”

  Scott waits for his mother to lash out, to say something biting, acerbic. Instead she just smiles her secret smile.

  And this seem
s as good a time as any to talk about black swans. Soon Florence and Alice will get the biggest surprise of their lives. As humans we have a love/hate relationship with surprise. We like our world to be just so, predictable, organized. We take risks, but we don’t like to be at risk. We hate when things happen that make us feel vulnerable, exposed, things that force us to drastically reassess the world in which we live. Why? Where does this need for control come from? To better understand it, picture a swan on a pond. It is beautiful. It is graceful. It is also white. All swans are white. This is what our experience tells us. But imagine one day you see a black swan. A black swan is, by definition, a surprise. Now take the notion of a black swan, and consider that there are events that happen in our world that lie beyond the realm of normal expectation. A terrorist attack. A tidal wave rising from the ocean and swallowing the coastal residents of four countries. They are events beyond the scope of our comprehension. Until they happen, they are literally unimaginable.

  Because they are unimaginable, events like these are, by their very nature, unpredictable. The theory goes that the very unexpectedness of a black swan helps create the conditions for it to occur. In other words, if you can predict it, it will not happen. Let me repeat that. If you can predict it, it will not happen. And yet people are always trying to find explanations for these events after the fact. As Kierkegaard says, history runs forward but is seen backward. This is the human mind at work. We are always looking for patterns, formulas that make the things that happened appear more predictable and less random than they really were.