A card leaned on the gilded frame of the painting. On the front was the Irish blessing. May the road rise to meet you. And on the inside, though he knew he shouldn’t read it, was a note from Ann. She loved him. She was sorry she couldn’t be there for his big day. She would come to see him soon.
May the wind be always at your back. He lowered himself to the floor, next to the muck that had splayed from the crashed table, where the baby kneaded knuckles of cauliflower.
May the sun shine warm upon your face. That’s what he would do. He would commission a painting. A painting of him and his wife and all four of his daughters, and he would move into his own place someday and put the painting right by the door where he could see it coming and going, the rains fall soft upon your fields, Eliza’s initials winking at him from the bottom, happy to have them with him. He held the card in his hands, and recited to himself the words that graced the front of the card.
And, until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
Phil played a lamenting Spanish tune on the guitar, and Belly wobbled toward Nora with his bruised and aching hip and his dirty shirt, the stale liquor on his swollen tongue, and he offered her his hand. Long ago he had showed her how to tango, he had placed her tiny feet on his own and instructed her in the walk, the stroll, the chase, the beginning and the close, all the churning steps of tango he knew. And he curled her across the living room floor now, her grown-up feet on the ground, he guided her through the spilled crudités and appetizers that lay scattered across the rug like a massacre. They whirled through the living room till the onlookers blurred into the background. They stopped, they stood and stared at one another, and the room reeled around them, everything swirling except the faces of father and daughter, so much alike.
When all the guests had gone, and the boys were asleep, and Nora and Phil passed out on the couch in front of the soft purr of television, Belly clomped up to the attic and retrieved his belongings from the back. Then he made his way to the second floor, down the hall to the guest room, Bonnie’s old room, Jimi’s old room: now it would be his room. He set his clothes in Jimi’s little blue-and-yellow-stenciled dresser, his khaki pants in the closet. He lay on the little bed and stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. He felt his liver relax; no more alcohol surged in his veins and he could see clearly in the night, no spinning or blurring or twisting of the dark. Booze was like a baby blanket for him—he curled up with it to sleep, but now was as good a time as any to start this terrible sobriety. He closed his eyes, and sleep came fast to find him, sleep took him in and covered him so he did not have to dream.
EPILOGUE
ONE STRIPE of sun snuck in the window and rested in a band across Belly’s face. He rolled his head from side to side. He swatted at it. It wouldn’t go away. He opened his eyes and he knew where he was and how he got there. He knew how many daughters he had and he knew what he had to do. He looked at the wallpaper—dark blue with glowing planets and comets and meteors and gassy stars, and he looked at Jimi’s astronomy books and his toys and his rug with the alphabet embroidered along the fringe, and he was not sure his daughters ever had such things, if he or his wife ever stopped to ask them what they wanted or showed them how to get it. He picked up a heavy hardcover book, The Way Things Work, and he opened it and read about the telescope, how it collects light to make faint objects visible.
The drawers of his new blue kid dresser slid open easily. The air was soft now, it was cooler and less humid; all that water had let him go. He leafed through his jeans, darker jeans and lighter jeans and jeans with holes and jeans with patches, his stained jeans and jeans from his heavier days and from when he was a little thinner. He shut the drawer and opened the closet and plucked from the wire hanger his one pair of khakis with a crease streaming down the center. He showered and then he slipped on the pants, the sleek polished cotton satiny against his shins, and they were an inch too big now, but he liked the way they hung, the way they hovered a little too low on his bones, the hint of hipbone sneaking out the top of the waistband. They looked like old-man pants, and it was a good look for him. He looked fine. He looked like a man who wouldn’t have to hump someone half his age, who didn’t have to invent witty drunken comebacks in the bar, who didn’t have to chase women or drink too much or hunt down old enemies who had disappointed him. He looked like a man who could sit on the porch and sip beer and watch ballerinas waddle by in July, watch tourists cluck at the uneven bricks of the sidewalk and the sturdy tufts of green weeds poking through, watch where the retards used to wander and where Shannon used to wheel by on white rollerskates with pink wheels, watch all the ghosts float by and he wouldn’t have to talk to any of them. He wouldn’t have to move. He could stay put in this life for as long as it took, him and his family, his cheap beer and his shit job and his old-man pants.
Nora had left him a note on the kitchen table—the family had gone to Jatski’s and he could join them if he wanted. The house remained in last night’s postapocalyptic state, piles of dirty plates and dried-up appetizers crusting the edges of Nora’s cut-glass serving bowls. He tiptoed through the downstairs, stepping around the mess and plucking from the surfaces cups and saucers and stray pieces of flatware, and he piled them in the sink. He swept through all the rooms, straightening the furniture, crumbing the couch, lifting the table and reattaching the lame leg until it stood upright again. He even straightened the maelstrom of magnets and photographs on the refrigerator door. Two wallet-sized photographs of his grandsons were tucked under a Cudney’s Cleaners magnet, and he slipped them off the fridge and into his wallet.
When he was satisfied he helped himself to coffee, sat and read the Saratogian, scanning the real-estate ads for cheap studios in Ballston Spa. Then he read the society section. Mary Lou Whitney was in town, of course, and her whole socialite posse, unscathed by past racetrack scandals. The rich people in this town, the summer people, were untouchable, and what made them so? Just because Cornelius Vanderbilt hooked up with some crooked Tammany Hall boxer all those years ago to open the racetrack, now his distant relatives still reaped the benefits. It seemed so unfair, that your genes decided your fate, or sealed it, or just cleaned it up so no matter how you erred you could still find your face in the society section.
For a very brief moment, at the height of his bookmaking days, when Belly was welcomed at civic events and the Paddock Pavilion at the track and even once ushered into Jack White’s fourth-floor box in the clubhouse, Belly thought he could jump ship. He thought someday he’d shake hands with Mary Lou Whitney, thought he’d be invited to her glamorous gatherings, thought he’d sneak his way into private parties at Siro’s, thought he’d leave behind his bland Irish roots, his blue-collar ties, thought the working-class accent he couldn’t even hear would erase and he would slip into Society. Loretta had done it, had married some money and floated away, but even with her new two-carat rock gleaming on her finger she was still a drunk, still slumming at a crummy bar on a Thursday night, and maybe no one could escape his fate.
Belly closed the paper. He thumbed through a jar of coins perched atop the microwave, and then he made his way out into the world.
He walked down Spring Street, and now he cut across the park, and it was the most beautiful day in the world, in his life, in his new life which was now a week old: he thought about when Nora turned six months old and they knew they’d passed the SIDS stage and they could breathe easily now. He was going to live.
As the opposite entrance of the park birthed him onto Broadway, construction crews were finishing the last big stretch of work on the new building by the bus stop. Somehow while he wasn’t looking, brick walls were erected to make a nouveau strip-mall fortress. Tourists sat in front of Café Newton with their million-dollar cappuccinos and everyone seemed calmer today in the cooler air, everything seemed lighter. He sat at the bus stop, on the other side of the street this time, in front of the ex-library, and watched the tourists stroll through the park, dow
n Broadway, hands clasped at their backs in perfect leisure pose, dreaming themselves back to the time when Saratoga was the Queen of Spas. If he closed his eyes and erased the construction site behind him, erased the fancy new cars, if he just looked at the women with their broad-brimmed hats and the men in their linen suits, Belly could believe he was back there, too; he was one of them.
The bus pulled up and today Belly had exact change. He had thirty-two dollars in his wallet and his expired driver’s license and the photographs of his grandchildren, and he sat on the bus as it hobbled through town past all the rich people and the locals sucking their money and the teenagers with piercings and skateboards and cotton-candy shades of hair.
They rolled down the arterial, Vanderbilt Highway, and Belly felt that sweeping sort of wind blow through his stomach, the way he felt when he went over a bridge, or got near water, any road trip where the bad gets left behind and the future is blessedly blank. And there was the mall.
He got off at the old mall, a mere shadow of a big-box that shrank next to its new mall neighbor. Inside he found the DMV, the terrible DMV with a line snaking out the door. Here’s where all the angry people were.
At the information desk he received a license renewal form. It cost a whopping twenty-eight dollars, and on the back was a little checklist: has your license ever been suspended, have you been convicted of DUI, and then, have you ever been convicted of a felony? He had to answer yes to every question posed.
He waited in the endless line, shifting his weight between the hips, fingering the waistband of his khakis. He was a man in costume: no one would know him in this old-man uniform. Belly inched forward in the line until a woman called his number and she scanned his form, took his money, he held his breath while she ran her finger down the form and didn’t even pause over the boxes he had checked.
He had to stand for a photograph, the points of his cowboy boots aligned with the strip of blue on scuffed linoleum tile. Only three minutes later they presented him with his new license, and the unsmiling man in the digital photograph was old; he was a senior citizen, but he was a handsome old fellow and Belly liked him.
He left the mall, left the stale air behind, and he walked over the bumpy highway and the sun smiled from the top of the sky and it was not too hot, not humid. Sun glinted off the tarmac. Belly wondered how yesterday had given birth to today. Yesterday he was ready for the Lord to take him and now he didn’t mind so much that his time had not yet come. He minded, but not that much.
He dodged the trucks on the highway and then he was once again in the big ocean of the parking lot. He had his new and improved ID in his pocket and the crumpled application and Wal-Mart had a million people milling about in the lot, the kind of people he knew in high school, the kind of people he saw at War Bar, at Jatski’s, at the East Side Rec, that poor man’s park. No oversized wicker hats, no bowties and linen suits.
He stood for a long moment in front of that big-box shop, that horrendous block of concrete, and he thought of the very first time he jumped from the cliffs up at Hadley-Lucerne, long before the retarded boy fell to his death. All his buddies were already in the water; they’d survived the fall. And he stood on that cliff that looked so humble from the water, but from up there on the rock the river was miles away, miles below him, and his friends called to him, called him a sissy, egged him on till the bottoms of his feet burned on the hot rock, burned with the desire to jump. And he did. He jumped and he felt his heart swallow his stomach and it took so long to hit the water, and when he did he landed sort of sideways, on his hip. The water slapped him and he swallowed a big mouthful of river and the wind was knocked out of him and he sank too far down, under the rapids. It was all so slow. Bodies kicked above him and then someone grabbed the back of his shorts and dragged him to the surface and he coughed up lungfuls of liquid and they razzed him, those boys, they patted him on the back and laughed and renamed him Belly-Flop for the afternoon. He swam to the water’s edge and caught his breath. Drank a beer. Let the sun warm his blue blood and melt his heart back into the right space, settle his stomach back down below his diaphragm. Then he climbed out of the water, climbed back up the cliff and jumped off again, this time holding himself upright so his feet splashed first into the river and the rest of him followed.
Now Belly buttoned up his white shirt and smoothed out his khakis, twisted his belt buckle back to the center. He looked at the eight automatic doors welcoming him to Wal-Mart and the distance between his feet and the entrance was as far as the top of the cliff and the water. And Belly took a deep breath. And he jumped.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My mother, Helaine Selin, bought me a plane ticket to Mexico, where I hammered out the first draft of this book, and a new computer when I spilled cranberry juice all over mine. My Saratoga pals, Julie Natale-Dwyer and Amy Knippenberg, housed me during portions of the writing, and my friends Katie Capelli, Lisa Sanditz, Bonnie Nadzam, and Melissa Lohman did me the honor of reading and commenting on early drafts, as did my stepfather, Bob Rakoff. My friend Lisa Gutkin sat me down by the railroad tracks in Peekskill and helped me devise a plan for the writing life. My father, Peter, provided a lot of technical racetrack information (he’s a musician, not a gambler, I swear) and was my gateway to Saratoga. And my brother Tim sat me down on his East Village roof one night in 1999 and said, “If you want to be a writer, why are you going to urban planning school?” I have two other siblings, Adrienne and Ben, who should be thanked just for being so swell.
My deepest thanks to Ron Carlson, greatest teacher ever, and to T. M. McNally, Jewel Parker Rhodes, and Beckian Fritz Goldberg for their feedback. Thanks to all the drunken poets at ASU, from whom I stole many a good line, and the MFA girls: Amy, Bonnie, Josie, and Kyla. Thanks also to the Muse coffee shop in Tempe and its wonderful oddball collection of regulars.
Also thanks to Mike Lapinski for dropping me off in the desert to do this, to Joe Stillman for not being surprised that I actually did it, and to Sean Sheridan for his endless patience, love, and support while I wrapped it all up. Thanks to my wonderful agent, Amy Williams, and to my equally wonderful editor, Reagan Arthur, for championing the book. Thanks to Ledig House for letting me hang out in bucolic paradise while I did the revisions, and special thanks to Josh Kendall, who sent me knocking on the right doors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Belly O’Leary? Tough guy, lives hard. Holds his liquor well. Won’t back down from a fight. Three grown daughters, one ex-wife, a mistress. Returning home to Saratoga Springs after four years away.
But what the hell happened to his town? The bar he used to own is gone. Wal-Mart and Starbucks stand in the place of familiar landmarks. His daughters treat him like an afterthought. No one laughs at his jokes. No one remembers his bar.
Belly is the story of a man shocked by change into a last shot at life. When the old friends, the old haunts, and the old ways look like they could cost him what is left of his life, Belly is forced to learn, small step by small step, to live in a new way. Holding on to an unshakable core of pride even as he confronts the secrets that have shaped his life until now, Belly makes an unlikely but irresistible hero.
Written with an astonishing understanding of the seedier ways of men, Belly is a brilliant and brilliantly funny novel about the masculine path, its joys and pitfalls, and the chance for reconciliation and redemption in even the hardest-lived life.
Lisa Selin Davis was born in Saratoga Springs, New York, and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts. She worked in the art department in the film and television industry for eight years, and studied urban planning and environmental psychology at the City University of New York. Her articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including New York, Metropolis, and Preservation. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, and the anthology Women Behaving Badly. She holds an MFA from Arizona State University and teaches writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Ea
rly Praise for BELLY
“What a triumph Belly is — a novel as fetchingly told as it is deeply felt, a book as much about hope as it is about loss, and a reminder, wrought through with love, that ‘time and chance happeneth to all men.’ Lisa Selin Davis is a writer who knows our crooked kind, who understands what animates and beleaguers, and who has genius enough to make high art of the Bellys among us, those souls cut adrift in a world turned wonderless and strange. Belly, dear readers, is each of us who has ever awakened to discover the terror of self-deception and the horror of a past that can’t be outrun.”
—Lee K. Abbott, author of Wet Places at Noon
“This novel starts to break our hearts from the get-go, while Belly stumbles forward looking somehow for his lost life. This crushing week is so closely wrought and so fully understood that it seems lived, occupied, real. Lisa Davis is an exciting new talent who knows men and women very well. Her stunning empathy for this family makes Belly a tour de force debut.”
—Ron Carlson, author if A kind of Flying
“Lisa Selin Davis has crafted a gritty, darkly comic, and sympathetic portrait of people left behind by changing economic times. Belly is more than a good first novel. It’s a good novel, period.”
—Neal Pollack, author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature Never Mind the Pcllacks
“Lisa Selin Davis is an amazing writer. Sentence for sentence she’s exactly the kind of writer I try to be, one who values the honesty and the life inherent in language itself, and through it creates a brand-new world.”
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