by Andre Dubus
‘A mongoose,’ he says.
‘He’ll ask me how to make that one.’
‘It comes with a cobra egg in its mouth.’ She is looking down at him, her eyes amused yet holding on to caution too, perhaps anger, waiting to see if this is harassment or friendly joking. ‘It’s the last egg in the nest. He’s killed the others. He comes up behind the cobra and she turns on him just long enough for the father to reach over the table and grab his son and pull him away.’
‘Sounds like a good one,’ she says. ‘Must start with rum and keep building.’
She is smiling now, and he is ashamed, for he sees in her quickly tender eyes that she knows something is wrong.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘For what? I like a good story. If we had cobras around here I swear to God I’d go live up ten flights of stairs in Boston and never see grass or stars again. You going to drink that?’
‘I’ll have a Coke with a wedge of lime.’
‘So that’s a mongoose. I think I’ll call it that, see what he comes up with. Now I like Jackson. But he’s his own man behind the bar. Any time—every time—somebody orders a sombrero, he says, What do you think this is, a dairy bar? Doesn’t matter who they are. He makes them, but he always says that. Won’t make a frozen daiquiri. Nobody orders them anyway. Maybe five-six a year. He just looks at them and says, Too much trouble; I’ll quit my job first. Young guy came in the other night and ordered a flintlock. Ever hear of that one?’
‘No.’
‘Neither did Jackson. He said, Go home and watch Daniel Boone, and he went to the other end of the bar till finally the guy goes down there and asks can he have a beer. Jackson looks at him a while then opens up the bottle and says. You want a glass with that or a powder horn?’
Hank keeps smiling, thinking that on another day he would stay here for hours, drinking long after his meal, so he could banter with this woman with the crinkles at her eyes and the large hands he guesses have held many a happy man. He could get into his country-western mood and find the songs on the jukebox and ask about her children and wonder how many heartbreaks she had given and received.
‘Better just tell him Coke then,’ he says. ‘You order a mongoose and he’ll send me the snake.’
‘He’s a bit of one himself. Coke with a wedge,’ and she is gone. He looks at Lori. She understands, and he glances away from her, down at the red paper placemat. When the waitress brings their drinks, they order food, taking a long time because Sharon cannot decide and the waitress, who is not busy this early in the afternoon, enjoys helping her, calls her Honey, tells her the veal cutlet is really pork tenderloin but it’s good anyway, the fisherman’s platter is too big but if she doesn’t stuff on the fries she might eat most of the fish, with maybe some help from the mongoose-drinker. Sharon orders a sirloin, and Hank is glad: he wants to watch her eating meat.
When it comes he does watch, eating his haddock without pleasure or attention: Sharon is hungry and she forks and cuts fast, and he watches the brown and pink bite go into her mouth, watches her lips close on it and her jaws working and the delight on her face. He remembers the smell of the sea, the feel of her hand in his, the sound of her breath beside him. Life, he thinks, and imagines the taste of steak in her mouth, the meat becoming part of her, and as his heart celebrates these pleasures it grieves, for he can see only the flesh now, Sharon’s, and the flesh of the world: its terrain and its seasons of golden and red, then white, then mud and rain and green, and the blue and green months with their sun burning then tanning her skin. All trials of the spirit seem nothing compared to this: his grave and shameful talk with Monica and her parents, Monica’s tears and seven more months of gestation, his taking the girl home, blanket-wrapped on his lap on the plane: cries in the night and diapers, formula and his impatience and frustration and anger as he powdered the pink peach of her girlhood, staying home with her at night and finding babysitters so he could teach—all this goes through his mind like blown ashes, for he can only feel the flesh: Sharon’s and his and the daughter in the chair beside him: she is a small child now, has lived long enough to love the sun on her face and the taste of steak. And for the first time in his life he understands that grief is not of the mind but the body. He can dull his mind, knock it out with booze and sleeping pills. But he can do nothing about his pierced body as he watches Sharon eat, can do nothing about its pieces sitting beside him in the body of a daughter, nor about the part of it that was torn from him last October, that seems still to live wherever they dumped it in the hospital in New York. He offers Sharon dessert. The waitress says the apple pie is hot and homemade, just out of the oven. Sharon orders it with vanilla ice cream, and Hank watches her mouth open wide for the cold-hot bites, and hears the sea waves again, and sees the long rubbery brown kelp washed up on the sand.
He does not phone Edith that night because Lori stays with him. She ought to go back to the dormitory: Friday night she walked to his house with clothes and books in a knapsack, and if she goes back now she can say she spent the weekend in Boston. If anyone asks. No one does, because her friends know where she is. Tomorrow she will have to wake at six while the students are still sleeping and no one is at work except the kitchen staff and one security guard who might see her walking from the direction of Hank’s apartment, not the bus stop. The security guard and kitchen staff are not interested; even if they were, their gossip doesn’t travel upward to the administration; student, secretarial, and faculty gossip does. Lori and Hank have been doing this for nearly a year, with a near-celibate respite last summer when, except for her one day off a week, they saw each other in Maine, after she had finished waitressing for the night. The drive from his apartment was only an hour, but he decided, grinning at himself, that it meant he truly loved her, that he had not just turned to her during the school year because he was lonely. He had not done anything so adolescent since he had been one: at ten he met her in the restaurant, they went to a bar for a couple of hours, then to her house for coffee in the kitchen, talking quietly while her parents slept; they kissed goodnight for a long time, then he drove home. He did not even consider making love in the car, told her if he did that, hair would grow on his bald spot, his love handles would disappear, and he’d probably get pimples. Some nights her family, or part of it, was at the restaurant, and they all went out together: father, mother, and one or both of her sisters home for a weekend. Hank liked her father, though he was hard to talk with, for he rarely spoke; Lori’s mother did most of that, and the two sisters did most of the rest. Everyone pretended Hank and Lori were friends, not lovers, and although Hank wanted it that way, it made him uncomfortable, increased his guilt around Lori’s father, and kept him fairly quiet. Often he wanted to take Mr. Meadows aside and tell him he and Lori were lovers and that he loved her and was not using her. He felt none of this with Mrs. Meadows, perhaps because as father of a daughter he imagined Mr. Meadows’s concern. Hank danced with all the women in the family and the mother was foxier on the floor than her daughters. She told Hank how pretty she was by joking about how old she was, about her lost figure (the body he held was as firm as Lori’s); she asked if he wanted to go to the parking lot for some fresh air, smiling in a way that made him believe and disbelieve the invitation; she did not ask what he was doing with Lori, but when she talked about Lori she looked at him, as they danced, with various expressions: interrogation, dislike, and, most disconcerting of all, jealousy and lasciviousness. On Lori’s day off each week she drove down to Hank’s, telling her mother the beach was better there, sand instead of rocks; she needed to get out of town for a day; Hank did all that driving back and forth and she owed him one day of visiting him; told her mother all sorts of surface truths her mother did not believe, and on that day they made love and after dinner she drove home again.
Hank does not call Edith Sunday night because he does not know whether or not his turning to her will hurt Lori, and he does not have the energy to ask her. When he realizes that is th
e only reason, he then wonders if he has the energy to love. He does not remember the woman he was with, or the specific causes, or even the season or calendar year, but he remembers feeling like this before, and he is frightened by its familiarity, its reminder that so much of his life demands energy. He imagines poverty, hunger, oppression, exile, imprisonment: all those lives out there whose suffering is so much worse than his, their endurance so superior, that his own battles could earn only their scorn. He knows all this is true, but it doesn’t help, and he makes a salty dog for Lori and, after hesitating, one for himself. Halfway through his drink, as they lie propped on the bed—he has no chairs except the one at his desk—watching All in the Family, he decides not to have a second drink. He has become mute, as if the day-long downward-pulling heaviness of his body is trying to paralyze him. So he holds Lori’s hand. At nine they undress and get under the covers and watch The New Centurions. When George C. Scott kills himself, they wipe their eyes; when Stacey Keach dies, they wipe them again, and Lori says: ‘Shit.’ Hank wishes he had armed enemies and a .38 and a riot gun. He thinks he would rather fight that way than by watching television and staying sober and trying to speak. He goes through the apartment turning out lights, then gets into bed and tightly holds Lori.
‘I still can’t,’ he says.
‘I know.’
He wants to tell her—and in fact does in his mind—how much he loves her, how grateful he is that she was with him all day, quietly knowing his pain, and that as bad as it was, the day would have been worse without her; that she might even have given him and Sharon the day, for without her he might not have been able to get out of bed this morning. But silence has him and the only way he can break it is with tears as deep and wrenching as last night’s, and he will not go through that again, does not know if he can bear that emptying again and afterward have something left over for whatever it is he has to do.
Some time in the night he dreams of him and Sharon lying on the blanket at the beach, the fetus curled pink and sweetly beside him, and asleep he knows as if awake that he is dreaming, that in the morning he will wake with it.
Monday night he eats a sandwich, standing in the kitchen by the telephone, and calls Jack and asks him to go out for a drink after dinner. Then he phones Edith. When she asks what happened he starts to tell her but can only repeat I three times and say Monica; then he is crying and cursing his tears and slapping the wall with his hand. Edith tells him to take his time (they are forever married, he thinks) and finally with her comforting he stops crying and tells the whole story in one long sentence, and Edith says: ‘That little bitch. She didn’t even let you know? I could have taken it. I would have taken your baby.’
‘I would have.’
‘You would?’
‘You’re Goddamned right. I didn’t even get a fucking shot at it. That’s why she didn’t let me know. She knew I’d have fought it.’
‘You keep surprising me. That’s what happens in marriage, right? People keep changing.’
‘Who says I changed?’
‘I just didn’t know you felt that way.’
‘I never had to before.’
‘I’m sorry, baby. I never did like that girl. Too much mischief in those eyes.’
‘It was worse than that.’
‘Too many lies deciding which would come out first.’
‘That’s her.’
‘I really would have taken it. If things had gotten bad for you.’
‘I know.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Forgive me.’
‘For what?’
‘Everything.’
‘You are. Sharon was very happy when she came home yesterday.’
Hank’s drinks are bourbon, beer, gin, and tequila, and he knows where each will take him. Bourbon will keep him in the same mood he’s in when he starts to drink; beer does the same. Either of them, if he drinks enough, will sharpen his focus on his mood, but will not change it, nor take it too far. So they are reliable drinks when he is feeling either good or bad. He has never had a depressed or mean tequila drunk; it always brings him up, and he likes to use it most when he is relaxed and happy after a good day’s work. He can also trust it when he is sad. He likes gin rickeys, and his favorite drink is a martini, but he does not trust gin, and drinks it very carefully: it is unpredictable, can take him any place, can suddenly—when he happily began an evening—tap some anger or sorrow he did not even know he had. Since meeting Lori, who loves tequila, he has been replacing the juniper with the cactus.
Tonight, with Jack, he drank gin rickeys, and it is not until he is lying in bed and remembering the fight he has just won that he can actually see it. Timmy’s is a neighborhood bar, long and narrow, with only a restroom for men. Beyond its wall is the restaurant, with booths on both sides and one line of tables in the middle; the waitresses in there get drinks through a half door behind the bartender; when customers are in the dining room, the door is kept closed on the noise from the bar. Students rarely drink on the bar side; they stay in the dining room.
Tonight the bar was lined with regulars, working men whose ages are in every decade between twenty and seventy. Two strangers, men in their mid-twenties, stood beside Hank. Their hands were tough, dirty-fingernailed, and their faces confident. Hank noticed this because he was trying to guess what they did for a living. Some of the young men who drank at Timmy’s were out of work and drawing unemployment and it showed in their eyes. After the second drink Jack said: ‘It’s either woman-trouble or work-trouble. Which one?’
‘Neither.’
‘It’s got to be. It’s always one or the other, with a man. Or money.’
‘Nope.’
‘Jesus. Are we here to talk about it?’
‘No, just to shoot the shit.’
Johnny McCarthy brought their drinks: in his mid-twenties, he is working his way through law school; yet always behind the bar, even when he is taking exams, he is merry; he boxed for Notre Dame five or six years ago and looks and moves as though he still could. Hank paid for the round, heard ‘nigger’ beside him, missed the rest of the young man’s sentence, and asked Jack if he ran today.
‘No, I got fucked into a meeting. Did you?’
‘Just a short one by the campus. Let’s run Kenoza tomorrow.’
‘Good.’
‘I’ll pick you up.’
The talk to his right was louder, and he tried not to hear it as he and Jack talked about teaching, punctuated once by the man bumping his right side, an accident probably but no apology for it; then more talk until he heard ‘Lee’ and, still listening to Jack and talking to him, he also listened to blond big-shouldered cocky asshole on his right cursing Hank’s favorite man on the Red Sox, that smooth pitcher, that competitor. In his bed he cannot count the gin rickeys or the time that passed before he heard ‘Lee,’ then turned and no longer saw the broad shoulders. Drunk, he felt big and strong and fast and, most of all, an anger that had to be released, an anger so intense that it felt like hatred too. As a grown man he had come close to fighting several times, in bars, but he never had because always, just short of saying the final words that would do it, he had images of the consequences: it was not fear of being hurt; he had played football in high school and was not unduly afraid of pain; it was the image of the fight’s end: the bartender, usually a friend, sober and disgusted as he ejected Hank; or, worse, cops, sober and solemn and ready for a little action themselves, and he could not get past those images of dignity-loss, of shame, of being pulled up from the floor where he rolled and fought like a dog. So always he had stopped, had felt like a coward till next morning when he was glad he had stopped. But this time he turned to the man and said: ‘You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’
The man stepped back to give himself room.
‘What’s that?’
‘Lee’s the best clutch pitcher on the staff.’
‘Fucking loudmouth spaceman is what he is.’
‘Fuck him. I was in Nam, motherfucker, and I don’t want to fucking hear you again: you drink with that other cunt you’re with.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t get killed over there,’ Hank said, his voice low, surprising him, and he turned away, nodded at Johnny, then he reached for his glass, confused, too many images now—and in his bed smiling he can understand it: dead children and women and scared soldiers and dead soldiers; and in Washington he and Jack quietly crying as they watched the veterans march, old eyes and mouths on their young bodies or what was left of some of them: the legless black with his right arm raised as a friend pushed his wheelchair, the empty sleeves, empty trouser-legs on that cold Inauguration Day; in his bed he can understand it: the man had given him a glimpse of what might have been his long suffering in Vietnam, for a moment he had become a man instead of an asshole with a voice. Then Hank surprised himself again: his rage came back, and into his drink he said: ‘Fuck you anyway.’
They were standing side by side, nearly touching: they turned together. Hank’s left fist already swinging, and his right followed it, coming up from below and behind his waist; then he seemed to be watching himself from the noise and grasping hands around him, felt the hands slipping from him as he kept swinging, and the self he was watching was calm and existed in a circle of silence, as if he were a hurricane watching its own eye. The man was off-balance from Hank’s first two punches, so he could not get his feet and body set, and all his blows on Hank’s arms, ribs, side of the head, came while going backward and trying to plant his feet and get his weight forward; and Hank drove inside and with short punches went for the blood at the nose and mouth. Then the man was against the wall, and Hank felt lifted and thrown though his feet did not leave the floor; the small of his back was pressed against the bar’s edge, his arms spread and held to the bar by each wrist in Johnny’s tight hands. Then it was Jack holding his wrists, talking to him, and over Jack’s shoulder he watched Johnny push aside the two regulars holding the man against the wall. The man’s friend was there, yelling, cursing. Johnny turned to him, one hand on the blond’s chest, and said: ‘I’m sick of this shit. Open your mouth again and you’ll look like your friend there.’ Then he turned to Jack: ‘Will you get Hank the fuck out of here.’