Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  “So what’s the story with Darlene?”

  “No story. She’s just there.”

  “Well, ‘just there’ is a story, right?”

  “No. It’s ‘just there’ because there’s no story. If there was a story, she’d be there ‘because’ and then there’d be an explanation.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Don’t Jesus Christ me. You’re the one asking the stupid questions.”

  “You like her?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s not incredibly enthusiastic.”

  “I’m more subtle than you are.”

  “Is this, like, a serious thing?”

  “Robbo,” he said—that’s what he’d called me, Robbo, ever since we first met in fifth grade—“is what you’re asking me am I gonna marry her? ’Cause if it is, the answer’s ‘Shit, no.’”

  “So—”

  “Is the next question gonna be some asshole thing about wasting my time or settling for someone who can’t hold a fucking candle to fucking perfect Anna?”

  “Do you really think Anna’s perfect?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “So, okay, yeah, that was kinda gonna be my next question. More or less.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Phil said. “I don’t really care that much about any of this shit. Don’t really care where I work or what I do. Don’t care if I’m with someone or if I’m alone. It all just seems like a lot of shit to me and some of it sticks and some of it doesn’t.”

  “You’re not practicing my wedding toast, are you?”

  “You think I should leave out the part about the shit?”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “I know you think I’m wasting my life.”

  “Hey,” I protested. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You have a very expressive face, though. And I understand why you think that. But you wanna know my whole philosophy of life?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Tough shit. My philosophy is: There’s nothin’ wrong with making people happy on any level. And you know what makes people incredibly happy?”

  I shook my head.

  “Bowling shoes,” Phil said. “People love to rent those bowling shoes, put ’em on, and go to their assigned lanes and bowl a couple of games. Really. You should see their faces. They love the feel, the fit, even the smell, I think. So I hand ’em over the shoes and I go home smilin’. And that’s the thing about Darlene, too. You know how happy she is havin’ me take her out to dinner and sometimes letting her come behind the desk at the bowling alley as if she belongs there? And then on top of that, gettin’ a taste of Phil’s Magic Ten Pin? The girl’s in heaven.”

  “I have to say, if I knew you were gonna turn out this weird, I’d have asked to move my seat away from yours in Mrs. Bates’s class.”

  “Too late now. And hey, by the way. I don’t want to embarrass you by giving you my present in public. So I’ll tell you now. Fifty percent off, lifetime, at Colavito’s Bowl-More. Except Friday and Saturday. And July Fourth weekend.”

  “I’m over-fuckin’-whelmed.”

  That conversation, along with the six-pack, was pretty much my bachelor party. A few of my college buddies had come down, too, to round out the wedding bash. Some were women, so there was none of the usual guy-only stuff. That evening Anna and I took Phil and all our friends out for pizza and more beer. We talked about life and the future and commitment and love, with some sports and fashion thrown in so neither sex felt deprived.

  No one from Anna’s family was there. She hadn’t invited anyone. When I pressed her on it and suggested that she might regret their absence at some point, she just shook her head and said, “I’d only regret it if any of them actually showed up.”

  During one of our first heart-to-heart-lying-in-each-other’s-arms-on-the-couch-at-three-A.M.-after-drugs-and-reading-poetry-aloud-to-each-other conversations, Anna told me that she hadn’t spoken to her mother since the day she’d left home for college. Though I was doing a reasonably good job of following the conversation, I was also a little distracted by the thought that maybe we should go out to IHOP for some chocolate chip pancakes. With the image of those delicious, syrupy mounds in my head, I casually tossed off my response. “Well,” I said, “what if she dies? Won’t you feel bad? Isn’t it better just to make peace?”

  Anna gave me a look that has haunted me ever since, one that showed she was really disappointed in me, that I’d just exposed myself to her and revealed that I was no different than anyone else. She must have thought I was worth salvaging, though, because she stayed in my arms and said, very softly, “If it was a man who was as abusive to me as my mother was, people would applaud me for leaving and never looking back. But because it’s my mother, people think there’s some kind of importance to the relationship. There isn’t. Abuse is abuse and I had to escape it.” I remember feeling incredibly ashamed. I apologized profusely and told her that I completely understood and that I thought it was one of the smartest, bravest things I’d ever heard.

  She pulled away from me a bit so she could look me in the eye and make sure I meant what I’d said. Then she stroked my hair and said, “Do you want to go get some chocolate chip pancakes?”

  After that, we almost never spoke of her family again. So when we were planning our wedding and in response to my question she said she didn’t want any of them to come, I didn’t argue. I just asked my question and accepted her answer.

  * * *

  Things were not that cut-and-dried with my family, of course. I don’t know if that was due to weakness on my part or the fact that the abuse on the Heller side was done in a much sneakier, harder to detect fashion. It wasn’t actual abuse. It was just … well, it was just family.

  Teddy and his new girlfriend flew in Friday afternoon from L.A., arriving in time to join us just as were leaving for the local pizza parlor. The girlfriend’s name was Charlie, and when I asked what her real first name was, she said, “Charlie.” She was from Oklahoma, and the whole time my brother stared at her with those familiar Teddy goo-goo eyes to show her and everyone else around him how much in love he was. They held hands almost constantly, and from time to time he’d stroke her arm or her cheek, just to add that extra little proof of affection.

  Like all the others, Charlie was perfectly nice. She was extremely attractive, with long brownish-red hair and a pale complexion, long legs, and enormous breasts, which she didn’t have much compunction about revealing via tight T-shirts or dresses with plunging necklines. And she was interesting, in an offbeat way. Three years younger than Ted, she had spent two years driving on the professional stock car circuit, quitting only after a big pileup in which she’d broken both her legs and her car had caught on fire. She was now working as a receptionist at a small ad agency in L.A., but her goal was to open her own garage. As she told this story, her breasts jutting through her tank top, the awed expressions of the men at the pizza joint resembled what I imagined people must have looked like when Jonas Salk announced his discovery of the polio vaccine. Except along with that awe, there was also a collective hangdog expression of despair that showed an understanding that no one else at the table would ever be able to have sex with a large-breasted ex–stock car driver. On the other end of the spectrum, the women at our table mostly revealed narrow-eyed suspicion or utter indifference.

  Charlie was interesting in another way, too: She was pregnant. Which explained why, on Saturday morning, she and Teddy showed up at the courthouse with a guy named Leonard, whom I’d never met or heard of before. When I asked Ted, who was my best man—it seemed the simplest, least hurtful thing to do, and I’d cleared it with Phil, who’d said, “Whatever makes everyone the happiest”—why he’d brought Leonard to my wedding, he told me that Leonard was his best man.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I mean, peckerhead, that we’re having a joint ceremony.”

  He smiled at me triumphantly. It was one of those Ted moments: I
was screwed no matter what I did. If I refused to let him go forward with his plan, I was an asshole, ruining this fun-loving, spontaneous, hilarious scheme that Ted had brewed up. He was doing something to bring us closer together; I’d be breaking us apart. He was sharing the love; I’d be spitting on the whole relationship. But if I agreed to the double wedding, I’d be: (1) almost certain to seriously piss off the woman I expected to spend the rest of my life with, (2) diminishing the experience and probably the memory of what should be the best day of my life, and (3) maneuvered by my brother, once again, into doing something I knew was wrong and that would somehow misfire and blow up right in my face.

  I went straight to Anna and told her what had happened. It was all of twenty minutes before our ceremony was supposed to begin. This was her exact reaction: She was silent for at least a full minute. Her eyes didn’t register anger; they clearly showed someone thinking through this bizarre situation step by step, imagining what implications it might have for many decades of marriage, all the way to old age. The silence lasted long enough to drive me to the brink of desperation and ended at the exact moment I was about to ask her to say something, anything. She said, very slowly and carefully, “I know you’re really upset. And the fact that you are makes me happy, because I know how much this means to you. But I don’t think Ted or anyone else can ruin this day for us. It’s our day. A lot of other people are getting married on this day, all over the world, but it’s still going to be our day and ours alone. So don’t give him the satisfaction of letting this ruin anything. Let’s just say okay and we’ll have our day and it’ll be exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”

  We kissed. I still remember it as one of the nicest kisses I’ve ever experienced. It’s not just that it was long and passionate; it’s that our lips seemed to merge together and our tongues tasted sweet, as if we were tasting the future and finding it delicious.

  Right before the ceremony, my dad pulled Ted aside and said, “Having a child’s not like having a dog, you know. It’s not a pet. It’s a huge responsibility. It involves a lot of sacrifice.”

  Ted nodded solemnly, then patted my dad condescendingly on the back and said, “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

  After Ted walked away to go stroke Charlie’s arm some more, I asked my dad if he liked Charlie. He shrugged and said, “She seems nice.” Then he said, “She’s not exactly what I envisioned as the perfect daughter-in-law.”

  I said, “How come?”

  “Well … she’s not very classy.” He hesitated a moment and then said, “Of course, neither is Ted.”

  It was a startling moment. A rite of passage. A completely unexpected wedding present from my dad. It was the first time he’d ever spoken to me adult to adult rather than father to son. I didn’t ask him what he thought of Anna. Not because I feared the answer—I knew Anna passed all the tests. I didn’t want to take a chance that he might say something about me. I knew I wasn’t his vision of the perfect son, but I had no idea of whether he had such a vision or what it might be. However, having already come close enough to entering the Twilight Zone, I thought it was time to edge away.

  Ted and Charlie got married first that Saturday morning. At ten-fifteen they both said, “I do,” Charlie crying and Ted smirking. Whoever the hell Leonard was, he handed the ring to Ted, gave Charlie a kiss, and then hugged Ted with one of those “I love you, buddy” man hugs. Teddy hugged him back, a full-body embrace. I guess they both meant it at the time, but I never heard of or saw Leonard again after that day. And I’m not sure Ted did, either.

  Anna and I were next. We’d thought about preparing our own vows and then decided it seemed too pretentious. We knew what we meant to each other and didn’t feel the need to share any of that with anyone else. The ceremony was our way of letting others into our marriage, but our feelings were private. So we just allowed the judge to do his duty. Teddy, still smirking, handed me the ring. Anna and I said our “I do”s and then the whole group went out to brunch at the best restaurant in town, a steak place that served eggs Benedict on weekend mornings, where we all ate mounds of delicious food, drank lots of champagne, and toasted the bright future.

  Afterward, Anna and I went to a small inn about half an hour from my parents’ house, on the Massachusetts side of the border. We drank more champagne and made love several times over the next day and a half. There was nothing extraordinary about our lovemaking. It didn’t break any boundaries and it certainly didn’t break any furniture. It was slow and sensual and extraordinarily emotional. Neither of us was all that experienced, nor were we particularly eager to experiment. We liked kissing and touching and falling into each other’s arms when we were done. Even though we’d made love plenty of times before then, that weekend was still special. I think we were both exploring each other’s bodies, looking for something, though I’m not exactly sure what. Maybe for the promise of whatever would give pleasure in the future, or a sensation we’d remember when we were apart. Mostly, I think, we were simply relishing our time alone and expressing that pleasure in a purely physical way. We said we loved each other, more than once but not so often that we felt as if we were trying to convince ourselves.

  That was our honeymoon. On Sunday night, Anna headed to Providence and I went back to Cornell. Anna was interning at an architectural firm and was due to spend the next week designing an ecologically sound bathroom using waterless urinals. On Monday morning, I had to dissect the cancerous liver of a recently deceased poodle.

  Over the next year, we talked almost every day on the telephone and got together almost every weekend. I suppose it wasn’t everyone’s notion of the ideal first year of marriage, but it felt ideal to us. Every weekend was special: We didn’t have to be with each other, we wanted to be with each other. After a couple of months of getting used to a heretofore unknown loneliness coupled with a joyful, if incomplete, sense of togetherness, we fell into a lovely rhythm. And almost every time we saw each other, we agreed that in all our lives we’d never suspected that we could be so happy.

  * * *

  Six months into our marriage—and Ted’s—Ted and Charlie had their baby, a boy. They named him Hilts, after the Steve McQueen character in The Great Escape, Ted’s favorite movie. The weekend after Hilts was born, Anna and I flew out to L.A., as did my parents. At the initial viewing of grandson by grandfather—Ted and Charlie brought the baby over to the hotel, where, courtesy of my parents, we were staying—my dad heard the name for the first time and to give his reaction some perspective, to say that he went ballistic would be akin to calling the Taliban a minor irritation to the women of Afghanistan. He was livid. In his view, Hilts was a pet’s name, not a boy’s name. He reminded Ted—maybe a dozen times in fifteen minutes—of what he’d said before the wedding: that having a child was not the same thing as having a pet. He lectured Teddy about responsibility and the future and the need to be a grown-up. And every time my dad said the word “pet” he looked at me, as if somehow my choice of profession had been the cause of my new nephew’s lifelong humiliation.

  Ted ate it up, relishing every moment of my father’s fury. Charlie just rolled her eyes with a “Well, that’s Ted” expression. My mother tried to calm my father down by saying things like “Greg” (she usually called him “honey” or “dear”; “Greg” was only for emergencies), “a lot of children have eccentric names these days.” But my mother’s words only caused my dad to breathe even more fire. Meanwhile, Anna and I spent a lot of time that weekend in the hotel’s restaurant, drinking coffee and trying to devise worse names for a kid than Hilts. I came up with Zimbabwe, Swami, and Pegasus. Anna went for Mephistopheles, Lanyard, and Papaya Joe.

  It was a difficult two days. As often with my brother, I never felt as if he were swinging an axe directly at my head or anyone else’s But I did start to feel as if all of us were being pecked to death.

  Ted and Charlie were living in a beautiful, too-expensive house in south Beverly Hills. It was below Wilshire, so they were living no
t among movie stars or studio heads but next to an actor who’d had the third lead on a TV series for four years, and across the street was someone who’d been the assistant director on the last Bruce Willis movie.

  As usual, Ted didn’t have money of his own; to my knowledge, he’d landed only one acting job since moving to L.A., a small part in an experimental play at a not-for-profit theater. But Ted did have superb taste, and that was very much his own. If he hadn’t considered the work so demeaning—no, that’s not quite right; it’s that he would have found it too ordinary, which I think may have been his biggest fear—Ted would have made a superb antiques dealer or decorator. He knew how to put furnishings together the way some people knew how to combine ingredients in a kitchen. Ted could wander into a shop, spot something, and immediately recognize both its beauty and its value. Almost nothing gave him as much pleasure as having an antiques dealer say to him, “You just picked out the most valuable piece in my store.” Or better yet: “I’m not sure I want to sell this; I’ve grown very attached to it.” Say those magic words and whatever was being discussed had about a ninety-nine percent chance of winding up in Ted’s collection.

  Ted wasn’t driven by a craving for money. He simply felt an overwhelming urge to be surrounded by things. He didn’t actually do anything or produce anything, so he defined himself by his possessions. They became all-important to him, intertwined with his very identity. And his possessions included his wife and his child. It was all about image: What mattered was the surface rather than the core. As long as his life looked orderly and successful, then all was okay and the underlying chaos could be ignored. Yet it was always painfully clear to anyone who knew Ted that before long the beautiful picture he’d created would be shattered. The pattern had repeated itself for too long not to be predictable.