Paul tastes the coffee, recoiling when a little dark wave leaps clumsily over the lip of the cup and scalds him.
'Do you mind the radio?'
Pirro is already working the dial. From the static emerges a crisp British accent. 'I hate American music,' he says. 'I put on the news. Just to have something to listen to.'
The report is an assortment of the usual. Taking tender sips of the coffee, Paul concentrates on it briefly, then lets his mind slip; Pirro isn't paying attention at all. He puts his weight behind the mop's stem, urging it forward, peeling away a strip of glistening checkered floor. He's halfway done when something in the newscast catches his interest. 'What a bitch. I can't believe they did not hang her.'
'Who?'
'Oh, you know, that woman. The one with a country for a name. England.'
On the radio is a discussion about the modern use of images, how the shocking becomes banal. The host has just mentioned Abu Ghraib: the horrid, hooded man, his arms outstretched as if hanging on the cross, wires dripping from his hands like threads of blood. How rapidly, says the host, it became canonical, like the Mona Lisa, ready for mass production on T-shirts and wall posters. She goes on to cite other enduring images of arrested death: the Spanish partisan, shot in battle, flailing back; the bullet passing through the head of a Vietnamese man; someone dropping from the World Trade Center like a blurry branch.
'Women just aren't supposed to be like that,' Pirro adds.
Paul nods, not knowing what else to say: no, women are not supposed to be like that. Nor, he thinks, are men, although perhaps he is wrong about that, and cruelty – bodily cruelty – is written into every masculine life. He takes his coffee to the window and stares blankly at the street. A few cars make quarter- and half-circuits through the roundabout. On the other side is the cinema, whose marquee holds a brilliant white vigil, but from here Paul can't make out the titles of the films it advertises. His eyes change focus. In the center of the roundabout is a pedestrian island. A person is standing there, at its near edge. There are bushes and benches on which vagrants sleep, but this is not a vagrant. At first the figure seems to be a trick of vision, the result of zooming between distances too quickly. Eyes are especially unreliable at night, and it's difficult to see through the yolky puddles of light on the windowpane, through the ghost of his own reflection. He concentrates. He is certain there was someone there, even if now he's gone.
'Listen,' says Pirro, oblivious to Paul's unease, 'I always have a beer while I clean up. No one minds. You want one?'
When Paul finally turns from the window, he sees Pirro, the mop leaning into his ribs like a rifle stock, already flexing the caps off two brown bottles. He doesn't notice as Paul replies, 'Yes. Yes, why not.'
After going through the day's mail his first act is to fill a tumbler with ice and a generous amount of Scotch. He waits for the drink to settle, listening to the liquor sizzle and crack as it finds pockets of air in the ice and they burst. Ben hasn't bothered to turn on the light in the study. He wants to have his drink in darkness. This is a celebration, a private one. As the clear strong flavor rises into the back of his nose, he holds the first sip on his tongue, suppressing the urge to swallow it immediately. Ben has always enjoyed little games of willpower, in which he competes only against himself; the Scotch runs down his throat. He replaces the glass on the desk, using the card his brother left as a coaster.
His wife walks up behind him. 'Do you want company?'
Yesterday, almost the whole of which he spent in the apartment, the monotony broken only by the trip to the hospital to pick up Paul, drove him crazy. This morning he had to get out, and he went early, before his wife was awake, in search of sunshine, oxygen, activity, distraction; he went without his mobile phone. For the whole day he walked all over the city, gulping it down like a tourist. Streets he'd never seen. Men performing drum music in a square. High, thin clicks chattering above a deep, violent pulse. Sounds born in a far-flung part of the world – there was a primal, tribal, even a sexual energy to it, a brutal, warlike dissonance. It rang in his blood. He imagined it as music used to rouse men for a slaughter. He had difficulty pulling himself away; he watched for half an hour, wrapped in his coat, then ate at a small cafe. No one looked at him. Beth's presence should calm him, ease him back to a feeling of normalcy, but his agitation isn't so easily solved. She's been worried about him, she knows the weight of everything that has piled up. His brother. His father. Work – the absence of it, the rest of the world continuing to operate without his hands on the levers. His wife's concern is understandable.
The silence hangs too long. 'So,' his wife says, 'what have you been doing all day?'
'Nothing. I took a walk.'
'I didn't even realize you were gone until Paul came by. I assumed you were just in your study.' When he says nothing, she adds, 'We said we would have lunch.'
'I had a sandwich at this little place.'
At the cafe he read the papers cover to cover, both the Times and the Journal, and watched the people at other tables. Young men, a few women, typing on laptop computers. Ears plugged with small, uncomfortable-looking headphones. They smiled periodically, laughed to themselves. He left, wondering what to do. Yesterday Beth had suggested that he read a book. She meant a novel; he hates fiction. It put the idea in his head nonetheless, and he walked to the bookstore on Eighty-sixth Street, intending to purchase a new biography of Eisenhower he'd read about, but it was out of stock. He walked around a while longer, sat by the lake in Central Park, and then finally came home, where he slipped in quietly and found the card on his desk.
'Beth. Please. I just need a moment to myself.' She leaves without another word. The floorboards groan under her feet, the usual murmurs, the brooding of a building with history.
Left alone, he takes another delicate swallow of the Scotch. His lips shrink with the pleasurable sting of ice. He hasn't been to work in two days, but the work lives within him, the numbers, hunches, pressures, the anxiety like a vapor in his chest. Energy futures have been especially volatile. Flux is worrying. Markets prefer constancy. There's another hostage situation in Nigeria's oil fields. Politics are obstructing development in Russia. He runs his thumb along the edge of the desk, trying to hush his mind. The desk is a good, solid piece, one hundred percent walnut; he bought it years ago, a gift for himself, a piece of furniture that fitted his idea of who he was and would become.
There's also Paul to think of. It's not worth being angry at him for leaving the card, even if the trace of fraternal provocation is unmistakable. He wanted to accuse Ben one last time of the crime of rejecting their father, maybe make a last effort to persuade him to relent on the matter of the will; in consenting to retrieve his brother from the hospital, perhaps Ben had made too large a gesture, one open to misinterpretation. He still isn't sure why, when she asked yesterday where he was going, he felt the need to lie to his wife about the errand.
His brother doesn't know the full story. Paul only knows that he, Ben Wald, turned his back on their father. Paul wasn't even born then. He doesn't understand that Ben did, once, love his father, as all boys do. That he was confused by his parents' divorce – in an era when that was far less common – and even more so by the silence with which his mother plastered over it: she allowed him to see Frank but never spoke of him, and always got tight when his name came up. Paul doesn't know how those years twisted up Ben, how they gnarled his insides, how they slowly made him hard. Ben knew his mother had been hurt by Frank but didn't know why or how. He learned from her a method of living: when you leave, you leave; you don't speak of the thing you left. And yet he did not hate his father – certainly he didn't want to. He wanted only what any boy wants: affection, instruction, praise. Frank tried, Ben knows; he did. Like so many divorced fathers he attempted to fatten their lean hours together with meaning and trust. When Ben visited him Frank was attentive, if guarded; were Ben to let himself recall them, the small moments would add up: being handed the razor and
then shaving his father's face for him, even after nicking him on the chin; eating bland meals of chicken and rice as Frank studied him for signs of enjoyment; suffering Frank's inquiries, delivered with pretended casualness, about his mother. But there was a cavity, and when Ben learned the truth – of who his father was – it didn't even come as a surprise. Of course, he thought. Of course there's something more. The reluctant submission to his father's restrained affection turned to disgust under the pressure of those greedy, self-pitying eyes. From Frank, who had given him so little, he was now determined to take nothing at all. He used the fact of his father's past and took shape around it, like an oyster with its pearl. He used it to make himself and then, at seventeen, he acted. The choice defines him. Ben is the Ben only who did this, who broke free. Frank was a poor father because he had already failed inexorably as a human being. And that is what Paul doesn't understand. Paul, who has endured none of it, who wouldn't have had the strength, and who doesn't know what it means to destroy a part of yourself. Ben sawed and chiseled until the idea became truth: there existed no one whom he could call Father, or Dad, or any of the names people use. He effaced the concept from his emotional lexicon. It formed again only when Jake was born. How could Paul understand that? Who isn't even a father. How could Paul understand that each time his son addresses him – 'Dad' – there rises up in Ben an extra, shivering throb of pleasure and pride, almost painful in its strength, one which must exceed that of even the most devoted and loving parents?
He stands. His blood shakes a little. The Scotch wasted no time working its way under his skin; drinking has become a rare event, especially with his heart. His mouth feels dry, and he squeezes his tongue against the roof. Arguing with Paul in his head will get him nowhere. Ice, still melting and restless, knocks around the glass. Steadying himself against the door frame, he pauses, then makes his way to the living room.
She doesn't see him yet: sitting on the sofa, she dips her head over a book, her neck curved like a swan's, and a few strands of hair fall toward the page. Girlishly, she has tucked one leg under herself, halfway into a lotus position. Beth has a trick of folding into herself that he loves. Nothing in the world but the sight of his wife can make him feel this sense of calm, comfort, completion.
'I bet you think I should go to the funeral,' he says.
She looks up and smiles, surprised, her eyes animated by a glitter of concern. 'Your brother seemed on edge. As though something were wrong. Something else, I mean.'
'It's probably nothing.'
He thinks of the kid outside his brother's apartment. Ben is a man who appreciates risk, the value of partial information, and he knows when he doesn't have enough. But it seems implausible that Paul got mixed up in such grim business – for one thing, his account of the dust-up in the street certainly contained a grain of exaggeration – and yet the one Ben saw did have a hardness in his eyes, an uncommon determination. Still, it's hard to believe that he plans to come around again. Characters like him have short attention spans; he'll find someone else to bother.
'Maybe you could talk to him.'
'Which do you want me to do? Talk to Paul? Or go to my father's funeral?'
'Ben.'
It can mean many different things, his own name. In this case, it has buried within it a gentle accusation of brotherly responsibility. During the first half of their marriage she leaned on him to include Paul in their lives. Time and again he acquiesced. It was she who made Ben invite him to their son's bar mitzvah. He wishes now that he hadn't lied to her about going to the hospital; he almost never keeps secrets from his wife – only those which are absolutely in her best interests. It's too late to tell her now. In any case, he isn't sure what he would tell her – that he can sense a decrease within himself of resolve; it began after a week of seeing his father's name alongside his own in the papers, when Paul came to see him on Sunday morning.
It may turn out to be nothing more than a stray product of the emotional untidiness he has felt since his son started college, which in time he will learn to control as he finds other vents for the surplus affection he's been left with. And it has nothing to do with his convictions about Frank. He'll continue to hold them, especially if he consents to a version of brotherhood: he must keep his grip on the firm thing, the thing he understands best, the one thing that has always been there. That can't be undone. His younger brother isn't going to undo it.
His wife's voice, again.
'I think you might not realize you regret it until it's too late.'
'I'm old enough to know what I will and won't regret.' He didn't intend it to come out that way – it leapt from his mouth – and he manages to force the beginning of a smile. He says: 'I just can't. I'd rather spend the day with you.'
'You'd better not try to charm me after your disappearing act this morning.'
'Want company?'
'Always.'
'Let me get my drink.'
He disappears from the room and returns to the study. To his eyes, accustomed now to the lights of the living room, the darkness is impossibly inky. He doesn't bother to turn on the lamp and instead feels his way to the desk, inching through the familiar space, stubbing his toe against the leg of a chair and breathing a single oath. He retrieves what's left of his Scotch, but doesn't yet turn to leave.
After the heart attack, during his recovery as he lay on the hospital bed – in a private room with a view of Manhattan as fine as that from many of the city's boardrooms and hotels – Beth and Jake sat with him. He breathed heavily, and never had much to say, but they stayed; they stayed while he slept. This was more than a year ago. On the second day, Jake had to go back to school and Beth left for several hours, and he recalls those hours as the worst of the whole ordeal – worse even than the first clenching agony in his chest, the first tingling in his left hand, the hot narrowing certainty that it was actually happening. He was in that room, alone. Hospital hours have a sluggish, garbled rhythm. IV tubes slithered around the bedclothes whenever he moved his arm, and he felt both very intimate with and very remote from his own body – he was listening to it closely, waiting for the next thing, but it had failed him, nearly irrevocably, and he knew he would never be able to trust it again. He was bored, anxious, terrified, and lonely. He spent a long time daydreaming about a girlfriend from college, trying to remember what mattered to them, what they talked about for so many hours. He was reading an article in Sports Illustrated about the upcoming football season when he burst into tears. Upon her return, he told Beth none of this, but stared at her until she asked him what he wanted. All he could say was that he wanted to come home as soon as possible. What those solitary hours in the hospital recalled to him, more than anything else, was that he was grateful for the family that was his. Those hours concentrated the idea into a serum, individual drops running warmly down his throat. His life began in a broken family, a fucked-up family, and he had managed to build one that wasn't. He knew precisely how much that was worth.
Almost out of the room, he pauses and returns to the desk, where he picks up the card his brother dropped off, a ring of moisture in the middle from the glass. Carefully he reads it once more. Calling out, he asks his wife if she wants a drink. He can't make out the reply, which he assumes was no; Beth's never been much of a drinker. He'll ask again when he returns to her. Before going, he opens his fingers and drops the card straight into the trash can, where it floats, an island of white upon the dark, mute sea.
For Paul to have agreed to drink a beer with Pirro means that he truly does not want to walk home, which in itself is even more worrisome than the prospect now of manufacturing conversation with a man who is, it must be said, a stranger. The silence is amicable enough, however, as Pirro steers around the cafe with the mop, occasionally stopping to make some remark about what's on the radio, or to point out some aspect of the store's operation he considers idiotic.
'The manager – he's Lebanese – he is a nice guy, but he doesn't know shit about running a bus
iness. I don't know why they don't fire him. First we run out of the hazelnut beans, then we run out of the orange-cranberry scones. Some people, that's their favorite! They want to know why we don't have them anymore.'
From time to time Paul looks out the window, but he never sees anyone, or at least no one who would concern him: just cars, young couples, old drunks wandering home from the corner bar.
'It's late, huh? You have to go?'
Paul says he doesn't have to go.
'Do you have a wife?'
'No. I'm divorced.'
'Divorce, an ugly thing,' says Pirro. 'But maybe not always. Marriage can be a burden.' He sets aside the mop and retrieves a second beer; as he crooks it open, Paul notices the ring on his finger for the first time.
'Where do you live?'
'Gravesend. My wife is there. She cleans rooms at a hotel in Manhattan. If I stay here long enough she will be asleep by the time I get home!' He laughs and drinks lustily from his beer.
Paul closes his eyes. Gravity seems to draw him deeper into the chair: a sense of comfort stretches across him like an extra skin. His earlier drowsiness returns as a pleasurable lethargy. He has a cold beer in his hand, there's nowhere he needs to go, and talking with Pirro demands nothing great of him. A few minutes pass. Pirro speaks.
'I am always surprised Americans make such good beer.' They are drinking Brooklyn Lager. 'I used to think it was only Europeans who understood it.'
Paul eyes him. 'Aren't you Muslim?'
'Muslim, yes! I am from Bosnia. You know your stuff. But don't act surprised, my friend. Muslims drink. They say one mustn't take alcohol because it harms the body, but when you know all the other ways there are to harm the body, it doesn't seem so important. Besides,' he says, lifting the bottle to his lips, 'it is just so fucking good.'
Laughing, Paul takes a drink of his own.
'In Germany,' says Pirro, coming closer to Paul, 'they have a toast. When you touch your friend's glass, you say, "Prost." Then you lock eyes until each man takes a drink.'
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