Through teeth still mostly gritted he called back, “Thanks.” And then he took her the coffee. And sat down with his wine. But with every intention of sipping it. She looked hopefully at him, her eyes wide, over the lip of her coffee cup, and he softened. He felt like an asshole.
So he said, “The work’s good.” And kept his smile stiffly on his face.
She nodded brightly. “I’m so glad to hear that. I was worried when I saw you Saturday night. I know from the guys that you haven’t been writing.”
He pressed his lips together. It’s not the heat…“So you guys just sit around talking about poor old Richie?” he said, shaking his head.
“Of course not! Nobodysaid anything—”
He raised his hand and rubbed his face. “Don’t…let’s not go…there. I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s talk about you. Painful subjects about you,” he spat. “How about that boyfriend? He know you’re here? He doesn’t care if you go visit the ex?”
She looked down, stared at the table. Her eyes filled with tears and her chin wobbled and he felt like an ass again.
“Hey—” he said, with a sigh.
“Richie—” she started, and he saw an opportunity in her face, and he shifted his chair around and got close beside her.
“Hey,” he repeated, and put his arms around her. “Hey.”
She shook her head, no, and moved only a little away from him, so he got closer, inching his chair awkwardly on the shining wood floor. She let out a sob and allowed him to hold her, leaning into him with equal awkwardness, her head and shoulders ending up somewhere near his heart.
“Hey,” he said dumbly.
“Richie, I have to tell you something—” and she cried.
He buried his face in her hair, the smell of her scalp close and familiar, like one of those memories from childhood that hit you when you feel bad and vulnerable. He pressed his face into her and ran his hands gently over her back, into her hair, along her shoulders. He ran his fingers up her spine, feeling and remembering each knob of bone. She was warm beneath her sweater. He longed to put his hands up under it and feel her skin; it was not lust, but her; he wanted to feelher “It’s okay,” he breathed into her hair.
She shook her head again, and began pulling away. He let her. He wanted to see her face. When she cried, her nose got red and her lips quivered. He wanted to see it.
He was distracted by her and hardly noticed that she was still shaking her head,no. And when she stood up and moved away from the table, he stood too, and followed her. She was still crying. He thought of a Kleenex, but the only thing he had was toilet paper, all the way upstairs in the bathroom—glancing through his mind quickly on another level was the option of getting her upstairs for tissue and then leading her into the bedroom and making love to her but he let go of it (remembering to thinkasshole but not really feeling it) and ran into the kitchen, grabbed the roll of paper towel by the sink and brought it to her. She took the whole roll, laughing oddly, and pulled off a sheet. She blew her nose, but kept crying.
“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” he asked gently. Some boyfriend trouble. If he was writing it, the boyfriend was history, she couldn’t forget him, but was afraid, was it right? She would hurt the other guy, gentle creature that she was, she couldn’t face that, but couldn’t live without—
“He asked me to marry him and I think—” She sobbed hard into the towel. “I don’t know what to say—” she said, and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook and Richie stared. “I’m so sorry, Richie, I’m so sorry,” she repeated several times, not taking her hands off her face.
He stared, incapable of saying anything. The room was filled with the sound of her crying, more softly now, and it occurred to him to ask her why the hell she was crying. It occurred to him to ask her to repeat what she’d said, he’d heard it wrong—on Saturday you were cooling it off.It occurred to him to ask her to die. To get lost. Tofuck off.
“I thought you were taking a break,” he said stupidly. It sounded flat. He was flat. He was one-dimensional. A stick man.
She nodded. “He came over Sunday night. He said he didn’t—” She wiped her eyes on the towel, looking up for the first time, although not at Richie yet. She looked at the opposite wall, something in the tone of his voice making her feel safe.
“Didn’t what?” he screamed.
“Don’tyell at me!”
They stood, separated by a room and a host of options. Neither spoke. Richie’s mind tried to graspJennifer’s marrying someone they said she would it was a joke how could she marry someone she was his what the hell do I say—”
He had no idea what to say, but they both stood there, motionless and dumb, and before he could stop it, he asked the last question he wanted the answer to, tried to stop himself and still asked it anyway.
“Are you going to marry him?”
Jennifer wiped her nose needlessly. She stared at the floor, and said nothing. His eyes widened and he raised an eyebrow, willing her to answer. But she didn’t.
She was.
“Well,” he said softly, “congratulations.” Then he laughed.
She looked sharply at him. “I haven’tdecided,” she screamed at him.
When he finally moved, his body responded as though on a five-second delay. He spun around too fast, his head light, and went and got his glass of wine. His heart thudded in his chest, but it was dull, like an ache. “Well, let me make it easy for you. I don’t care what you do. That’s what you wanted me to say, right? You wanted me to say it was okay. It is. I don’t care.”
He sat at the table and glared at her, tried to pretend it wasn’t a glare. She looked around the room, the candles burning, the flowers.
He shook his head, “I wanted to get laid,” he said. “Pardon me.”
She closed her eyes and sighed heavily, put-upon; that sound was also familiar, the patented Jennifer’s-had-enough sound. Fuckin’ princess. “Don’t do this,” she said.Took the words right out of my mouth.
He downed the wine in his glass. He stood up and went into the kitchen and came back with the bottle Jennifer had brought. He opened it with the same jerking motions with which he had opened the first. “So when’s the happy day?” he snarled. “Am I invited?” She wiped her nose again with the paper towel and then went to the hall. “Come back. Let’s toast theunion.”
Jennifer crossed her arms over her chest and stood framed in the doorway between the hall and the living room. She screamed at him, her body leaning toward him.
“I didn’t want it to be this way! I wanted to talk to you about it! This is my life!”
Richie poured himself another glass.
“Go ahead, drink until it hurts. Or doesn’t hurt,” she said evilly. He did not respond.
“I’m sorry,” she said, starting to cry again.
“Just fuck off.”
Stick your sorry.
That would be “sorrow,” Mr. Bramley.
Oh, pardon.
She grabbed at her coat and it stuck on the hook. She tugged angrily at it, her pretty face contorting in a sneer. “I knew it would be like this.I knew it. Never mind,” she said. She shook her head and pulled her coat down. The zipper clacked on the floor.
“Don’t scratch my floor,” he said petulantly, from behind a fog. Rajah looking down on the Kingdom of All Right.
“Another pleasant evening with Richie Bramley, author of nothing but his own demise,” she snarled back. It had the distinct flavor of a speech written some time before and practiced. He knew these speeches well. And in this honor he raised his glass to her insalud but by then she didn’t see it, because she was tearing open the door and slamming it hard, leaving behind her a whirl of snowflakes, big and fat and white and happy. They danced into the hall and descended, elegantly, to the floor.
Richie drank.
It was a dangerous sort of drinking, filled with abandon, no holds barred, untethered, unfettered and completely (for a change) justified. There woul
d be no stopping.
He stared at the wine bottle. The bottle she’d brought.Well, let it bring me pleasure. And it will. And it was good, so sayeth Lord Richie Bramley, Rajah of the Kingdom of All Right. It was a Merlot. She had a fondness for Merlots, in the way that a passenger has a fondness for a Mercedes.She had no idea, not a grand clue of the pleasures made possible by a decent Merlot. She might know a decent Merlot, but she wouldn’t know a decent drunk if she stepped on him, ha ha.
Richie had watched the door for a good half hour after she’d slammed it shut, expecting (not really, but expecting) her to come back through it again, and tell him once more,I’m sorry I know how difficult this is for you I know how difficult you are and I love you anyway I know how difficult. But, of course, she didn’t. He did not so much give up on it as forget to watch after a while. There were other things going on.
He stared at the dishes on the table. He felt that humiliation. He let the candles burn, enjoying the horror of their witness.Ha ha you thought you were going to get the girl did you we have seen all the love and we knew all along ha ha. He rewrote every line he said in his head. By the time the third glass of the last bottle of wine was drunk, he didn’t come off quite so bad.
So many things he could have said.
Simple.What do you want to do? Because even three sheets to the wind he knew,knew, that that was the crux of the matter, and the right thing to say. So simple. But he had instead baited her with anger and then got the spatter back.
In his head as written by Richie Bramley, master of the supernatural and all things paranormal, he said all the right things.
The dishes, he felt, stared back at him, smugly.We knew, too. He sometimes buried his head in his hands and cried. Drops on the tablecloth, the crisp, sharp folds still visible, were testament to it. It went unnoticed by him.
There are four glasses in a bottle of wine. (Unless you get the jug, and no one gets the jug after age thirty.) And Richie poured the final glass, licking the last drip as it dangled on the mouth of the throat of the bottle. The last glass of anything—if you notice—is a depressing and downright loathsome thing. His first taste of it was a sip.
He piled a plate on top of another. He picked up cutlery and put that on the plates. It was a mess. The kitchen was still full of dishes and pots and pans, because in spite of having cooked a simple meal, he had seemed to require numerous and sundry appliances. They were scattered everywhere.
He hid from himself his need to hurt. And he piled dishes. He thought about Porter. Or tried to. The boy in the story. The story, at that point, was too far away from him to make even a small dent in his head.
She could come back. He could call her tomorrow. Don’t do it. Come back to me. I’ll fix it. I’ll do it all. Everything. In a burst of condolence—whether to him or to her he didn’t analyze—he thought he would quit drinking. He stumbled into the kitchen, glass in one hand, dishes in the other and made that vow. I’ll quit.
I will. Tomorrow I will. If you come back. If you come back and stay.
But the feeling in his head was an old and familiar friend that he needed. The only condolence he got came out of the bottle, the only time he could make things completely right (or not matter) was with the bottle.If you could bottle that feeling—and thank god someone did.
He put the dishes in the sink. He put water in the roaster—her roaster—to soak off the remnants of potato that had stuck there. It was tossed into the sink also, where it stood at an awkward angle, the water all on one side. He tried to prop it up on a glass and it fell. He wandered around the kitchen, back between stove and sink a couple of times, and called it done. He downed the last of his wine.
The glass was empty. And something niggled at him.
Enough.
Even as he argued, a lesser part of his brain whispering truths, Richie walked deliberately over to the far corner of the last cupboard under the sink and opened it. Amid the bottles of cleanser and dish soap was a gleaming, shining example of the American go-to attitude that he liked. A contingency plan.
He reached out for the (half) bottle of bourbon (half) hidden behind a rag and a bottle of cleanser.Aha.
Hello. And how did you get there?
It flashed through his mind. The trip to the liquor store. The standing endlessly in the wine aisle, finding, choosing, reading, just the right wine to bring her back. To tell her, I’m okay now. A benign wine. A wine of the casual drinker. A wine for all seasons. He wandered through the wines of Italy, France, America, South Africa, Spain, Canada, way to the back, where there was no wine.Ran out of wine. The bourbon had been in his hand, almost as a before-thought, and then he picked a nice light, woody South African because it seemed arbitrary and just the sort of thing a non-totally-casual-drinker might choose because of its political value.
The bourbon had come along just for the ride. And now it gleamed with possibilities.
Enough.
Go to bed. Write like hell tomorrow. Be—
He pulled it out and turned the cap before he had a glass or a decision at hand.
On the couch, much later, he ruminated and came up withit just wasn’t really worth it. His heart was gone. History. Toast. No more heart. She had taken it with her. He stared unfocused into the dark of the living room (the candles had long since burned away) and thought that it (most of it) was over. She wasn’t going to come back. Not to him. Not to that. To this. And somewhere in the rumination came the scent of something bad.
It took a long time to get there.
He became aware, first, of his nose tingling. He smoked intermittently,smoking too much nose hurts, but realized in a sleepy part of his brain that it wasn’t smoke he smelled, but something burning.
It grew until it bothered him. His house on fire.It would just be like that, for sure.
Bitch.
The highball glass on the coffee table swirled and doubled but looked nearly empty no matter what the view. Richie leaned over and filled it to the halfway mark (half-full), slopping bourbon down the side and onto the table.
The smell lingered, getting inside him. He tasted it in his throat. It was bad, like something gone over, tires burning, the dump. Decay. He frowned and stood up, wobbling, nearly falling back down onto the couch again, and then, grabbing his glass, he sniffed the air. It was hard to tell where it was coming from.
He squinted into the dark room looking for smoke. He couldn’t see anything, although, he realized, he could see two of the nothing that he saw. This made him giggle. He stumbled past the couch, hitting his shin on the coffee table without noticing.
He walked first toward the kitchen, the most obvious place in the house for a fire. The smell was less noticeable in there. He tried to remember if he had shut off the barbecue after the steaks were done, but remembered that he hadn’t been drunk then. Not then. Just now.And I am most definitely drunk now. He walked to the back door and, after a couple of futile passes, pulled it open and peeked outside. No smoke. No obvious flame. Just the smell of steak.
The faint smell of meat cooked earlier was nostalgic and accusing. He hadn’t meant it. None of it. Drunken regret overwhelmed him for a moment before anger took its place. He had meant well; it just hadn’t come out that way.
He was misunderstood. Always had been.
Nobody knows what it’s like to be me, he thought with boozy self-pity.
He stared out into the dark wishing he was seeing it through someone else’s (sober) eyes, squinting, trying to focus. All he could really see was the dark. A metaphor for my life, he thought, with equal parts pity and clarity.
Fuck it.
He backed up and closed the door, forgetting entirely why he had opened it in the first place until he was assaulted, the moment the door closed on the fresh air, with the acrid smell of something burning. It seemed almost to be coming from behind him, thicker there in the hall than it had been in the kitchen or the living room.
Funneling down the stairs.
Still holding his dr
ink, he wandered down the hall and looked up the dark stairwell. Upstairs in his room, the candles would still be burning. One might have fallen over, lit something man-made, something made of chemicals, synthesized from nature, getting it right in every way except the way it smelled when it burned. A shirt; a sheet; there were no curtains as yet in the bedroom. There was a little rug on the far side of the bed by the window.
Very logical. Or maybe, by then, the candles would have burned out. Given up.
He climbed the stairs, pausing at the bottom only a moment to sip his drink.
* * *
The bathroom light had been left on for Jennifer, in case she had to go there in the planned interim between dinner and retiring to the candlelit bedroom. Richie’s bedroom door was closed; he thought maybe the flickering candlelight, spotted on her way up to relieve herself, might have seemed presumptuous.
The smell was very strong at the bottom of the stairs. He jogged his way up, taking the stairs two at a time, one hand on the rail, his drink splashing dangerously against the sides of the glass. The light from the bathroom pooled in the hall outside the door.
At the top of the stairs he flicked a switch and the upstairs hall sconces came on.
The hatch to the attic was open, the ladder down. Like an invitation.
He looked to his bedroom door, still closed, and back to the attic. He stared at it, blinking once, a long, restive blink.
I closed that.
Without giving it further thought, he reached over (not taking his eyes from the hatch and the ladder,just hanging there…yoo hoo! Up here!) and turned the knob to his bedroom, pushing the door open.
It was dark in there. No glow from the lit candles.
Dragging his eyes from the hatch with both drunken and cautionary slowness (Yoo hoo! Up here!),he poked his head into the bedroom and sniffed deeply. There was a smell, but it was waxy and familiar; like a burned match. Sulphury. He flicked on the light. He saw the small glass candle holder, purchased just that afternoon, on the edge of the dresser closest to the window. It was burned down, and the sides of the glass were murky and gray with the residue of the candle. He looked over to the bedside table and saw a virtual replica of the first. He stepped inside just two steps farther, and glanced over toward the side of the bed. He couldn’t smell synthetic fibers smoldering; he counted off his five little candleholders that had made their way, foolishly, upstairs and nothing was tipped or dripping.
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