by Monica Wood
“Nothing. He’s gone.”
“Aw, come on.”
“No, really,” I said. “The story ends.”
In a slow-burning hindsight, I understood that the notion had been with me for months—present, but not fully arrived: Grief is not endless. “You’ve been a good listener, Harry,” I said peaceably. “Maybe that’s what strangers are for.”
“That’s not what strangers are for,” he said, and I looked up just in time to see the lurching blur of his face. His lips didn’t quite meet target, and what he clearly intended as a first move ended up feeling like a good-bye kiss, a harmless little smack just clear of my mouth. His jaw felt clean-shaven and smelled of cologne. And liquor, too—I caught it as I drew back, stunned that he’d kissed me and also that it had not been as awful as I might have guessed.
I covered my mouth. “What are you doing?”
“Strangers are for filling up space,” he said hazily. “They’re for sitting next to in bars so your stories sound brand-new.” He lifted the cup to me in an ambiguous toast. “I spiked mine. You want some?”
I got up. “No.”
“Jesus on a stick, I think I hurt your feelings,” he said, pulling a bottle from beneath his chair. A quart of whiskey, a label I’d never heard of, probably the kind that ended up in storm drains all over America the beautiful. He knocked back the rest of the faux Gatorade and filled his cup exactly halfway, measuring scrupulously in a skewed show of decorum. Then he set the bottle down with a clunk of relief. “Now, come on,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“I—” Standing there, I felt small and needy and ridiculous. “That was—inappropriate.” I cringed at the word, one of the words of my profession.
He waved me off. “I just figured what the hell.” He himself drew back now, wrapping his hands around the flimsy cup.
“It never occurred to me—” I searched for words that wouldn’t shame me, and failed. “I thought—you seemed to—think of me as a daughter.” But not an actual daughter, of course. A pretend daughter, a vapor daughter, something to be reshaped on an as-needed basis. Surely I had done the same to him. It was so much easier to consort with vapors; unlike actual people, they didn’t demand much.
“The last thing I need is another goddamn daughter,” he said. “But you’re the only company I’ve had in two solid years and beggars can’t be choosers.” He controlled his cup with slow, practiced trips to his mouth, nodding after each one, as if trying to prove to me he could drink like anybody else, in moderation. “Your husband thinks you’re in a goddamn shrink’s office. What was I supposed to think?” He took a messy swig, all pretension gone now. I could see that he was embarrassed. I’d embarrassed him by being young and insulted.
“You’re more like my daughter than I thought,” he said suddenly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean she’s always wanting to go back. Go back, go back, go back. Me, I like to stay where I am.”
“That system’s served you very well, I can see.”
He gave me a crooked look. “Why don’t you just say good-bye to the priest and get it over with? I got three other kids out there who flipped me off for good a long time ago and they’re doing just fine. Elaine, she’s the only one, she never figured out how to do it.” His eyes took on a watery vagueness as he drank again from the cup, a good, long pull.
“I am going to say good-bye, for your information,” I said, deciding on the spot. “I’m going to pay a visit and lay some flowers on the headstone.”
He seemed to be enjoying himself again. “First you gotta find out where they put him.” He saluted, knocking his eye in the process. “You gotta face down the boys in black.”
“So I do,” I said, buckling inwardly. After twenty-one years, it would be back to church for me.
“What the hell,” he said. “Here you are, you caught me, so have a drink.”
I crossed my arms. “Were you drunk when you found me?”
“As a skunk.” He lifted his cup. “Bottoms up.”
“I don’t suppose you saw any white light.”
His demeanor shifted again. “I might’ve,” he said quietly. “Once you mentioned it, I thought I might’ve. I’m not that much of a liar.”
“I’m leaving, Harry.”
“Aw, come on,” he said. “Stay. Talk some more. I like your voice.” When I picked up my coat, he added, “Hey. I saved your life. You owe me.” He splashed some whiskey into my cup. I perched on the edge of the chair arm, halfway between sitting and standing, not committing myself.
“Stay here,” he said. “I thought we were friends.”
“We’re strangers, Harry. Perfect strangers, and you know it.”
“Fine, sure. But if you’ve got so many goddamn friends, how come you’re not home talking to them?”
“I have plenty of friends,” I said. I took one burning sip out of my cup. “There are times when a stranger can come as a great relief.”
“Touché to that.”
We remained like that for a few more minutes, pretending not to be drinking alone.
“My husband calls you the bad Samaritan” I said after a while.
“I’ve been called worse by ladies’ husbands. Not in years, though, sorry to say.” He looked up. “I didn’t do the whole job. I know it, all right? I never do the whole job. I owe something to everybody I’ve ever known. But I was kinda hoping that me and you, we’d come out even.” He shook his head slowly, looking dwarfed and tired in a freshly bought chair that wouldn’t last three years.
“You listened to me all the way to the end, Harry. We’re even.”
I did not want to be owed. I wanted to be seen.
“Even up?” he said. “No loose strings?”
“No strings.”
His mouth relaxed into an approximation of a smile. “So. You coming back here, or not?”
I rested my gaze on the bottle. “Seems like you’re going to be kind of busy for a while.”
“It’s the damnedest thing,” he said, then settled back in his new tweed chair with the resignation of a man so used to losing things they no longer registered as losses.
I leaned down and put a hand on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t operate any heavy machinery for the next couple of hours if I were you.”
“Hah. Good one.”
I buttoned my coat. He struggled out of the chair—no small effort—to shake my hand.
“All right, then,” he said.
I took his hand and kissed it, half expecting him to vanish like a genie. “Even up,” I said, and left.
I got home well before Drew, who had gone to Boston for a Celtics game. “Did you guys have fun?” I asked as he tiptoed into our bedroom, hoping not to wake me.
“Charlie bailed,” he said. “Two of his line workers didn’t show up for their shift, so he had to cover for them.” He was moving carefully through our bedroom, taking off his clothes. “I went by myself.”
I snapped on my bedside lamp. “Did they win?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Pierce had a triple double.”
This is how people managed to drift along in a marriage—being polite and going to bed at different times.
“Did you call anybody? You could have given away Charlie’s ticket.”
“It was last-minute,” he said. “I didn’t mind going alone.”
Unlike Charlie—hat-tipper, baby-kisser, favorite brother in a family of brothers—Drew was a loner by nature. The thought of him sitting by himself in a cheering crowd made me sad. We had friends, but not many; we were alike that way. People still came up from Boston for the weekend sometimes; we went to faculty get-togethers; occasionally someone we knew in college would find us in the phone book. But except for Mariette and Charlie there was nobody we spent much time with except each other.
I glanced around our bedroom, at the shelves and baskets and closets and dressers landfilled with broken watches and unopened packages of underwear and broken-
backed novels and too-short belts and too-long shoelaces and owner’s manuals for obsolete appliances and clothes we would never wear again and canisters of ruined film and plastic knick-knacks and porcelain gewgaws and moth-eaten pennants and greeting cards with no envelopes and entire, undiscovered layers of things we were psychologically and probably pathologically unable to part with simply because we had once touched them and because they were—though useless, though ugly, though out of style, though crumbling at the core—ours.
“Do you think it gets harder to make friends as you get older?” I asked him.
“It’s starting to look like everything gets harder as you get older.” He was standing beside the bed, taking off his socks, wearing nothing else but a pair of grayish underpants whose listless waistband barely held at his hips. This, more than anything else right then, made me feel married.
“Maybe we should have had more friends,” I said.
He got into bed with me, lying still, staring at the ceiling. “Maybe.”
“You meet someone new, you get to talking, and the person really seems to be listening, and you feel so, I don’t know, revealed.”
His voice tightened, though he didn’t move. “Is this about whoever you’ve been seeing?” I felt his eyes slide over. “Your therapist with the really strange hours?”
I steeled myself as he sat up to face me. “It’s not an affair,” I said, which wasn’t quite true.
His face filled with resignation. “No? Then what?”
“A friendship, I guess you’d call it.” I let a moment pass. “I’ve been seeing the bad Samaritan.”
His face wrinkled in confusion for a second—then he got it. “You can’t be serious.”
“He phoned me at school.”
Drew snapped his mouth shut. Stared.
“I was just curious at first,” I said, trying not to look at him. “I figured I owed him a thank-you and he owed me an apology, but then I noticed that when I was with him this feeling, this awful feeling I’ve had ever since the accident, it just went away.” Out came the truth, a ribbon of relief. “He lives in Portland.”
Drew swung his legs over the edge of the bed, his feet thunking to the floor. “Name?”
“It’s over now anyway.”
“What’s his name? It’s a simple question”
“Harry Griggs”
“And he’s not a shrink, I take it.”
“A vet—ex-Army. He’s an electrician now. Well, not at the moment. There’s a slight drinking problem.”
Drew stood up in his ill-fitting underpants, his skin mottled where he was cold and fish-white where he wasn’t. “This, Lizzy, this, I have to tell you—I don’t know what to say. I thought, okay, she’s seeing somebody, but at least—at least the guy’s alive, some guy from rehab, probably, but at least it’s something we can fight about, something real. I thought seeing ghosts was the problem. But this pretty much takes the cake. What can I say except—well, there’s nothing. I have nothing to say.”
“He saved my life.”
“He moved a body off the road”
“My body, Drew”
“And we, what, give him a medal for that?”
“It’s not what you think,” I said quietly. “He’s, like, sixty years old.”
Drew began to move around our bedroom, picking up the clothes he’d just shed and returning them to his body as if trying to put time in reverse.
“He listens,” I said. “He believes everything I say.”
“I don’t see why he wouldn’t. A drunk with nothing to lose.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you, Drew. I knew you’d figure him for some lost soul with nothing better to do than listen to me talk.”
“I didn’t say that. You did.” He returned to our bed, fully dressed again. “Was he drunk when he found you? Is that why he ran off?”
I looked away.
“This fucker left you in the mud without even checking for a pulse. In the meantime, I’ve been right here, running out of ways to put you back together.” He squeezed my shoulders—out of frustration, protection, left-over love—looking eerily like the pictures I’d seen of his father, the military man who never had enough stripes, who expected the worst and mostly got it, whose grip on his son was such that the son could not speak of the father.
“There’s something else, Drew.”
He looked at me.
“It’s about Father Mike.” I wanted to say, I’ve moved on. I’ve snapped out of it. Time has healed all wounds. I wanted to say, Forgive me.
“You know what’s ironic?” he said. “After the accident, my big fear was that you’d lose your memory.”
“Drew—”
“Tell it to your boyfriend,” he said, swiping his keys off the dresser. “I’m going to see Charlie. Don’t wait up.” I couldn’t imagine anything more lonely-looking than Drew knocking on the door of Charlie’s McDonald’s after hours, the crew gone home, the grill cleaned, the yellow sign darkened for the night, Charlie fumbling with the lock to let Drew in. Two grown men in their own Hopper painting, sipping coffee at a booth in the window, talking about whatever men talk about. My name would not come up, because Drew did not speak of the things that most pressed him.
Before leaving, he paused at our bedroom door. “Lizzy,” he said. “You expect too much of me.”
The words landed hard. We flinched, each of us, at the bare, bald truth of our marriage: You expect too much of me. Two empty vessels hoping to be filled.
The Little Hours
NONE
SEVENTEEN
From The Liturgy of the Hours:
This guilt of yours shall be
like a descending rift
Bulging out in a high wall
whose crash comes suddenly, in an instant. . .
He is watering a lawn in Conlin, Ohio. A flat landscape. Flat and uninspiring in the weak light of early morning. Over the pickets of his fence—yes, a picket fence, and a twelve-year-old boy getting into the family car parked on the stiff sheet of driveway that smells of fresh resurfacing—he can see ten, no, fifteen houses, vinyl-sided and shallow-pitched, like his. This neighborhood, so like the watercolor neighborhoods from the educational primers of his youth, rarely fails to please him. At fifty-nine years old, he can hardly believe he landed himself here. In this evenness. This place of straight lines.
His wife, a husky, sandy-haired woman named Frannie, moves past him over the black, sealed driveway, her heels clicking smartly. She has a boy to drop off, a hundred errands, then work. He envies her. Urgency is one of the things he misses about the life he once led.
They have been married five years now—five solid, blessed, uneventful years. Frannie likes having a husband; after nursing Alfred through his cancer, she seems glad to feel like a wife again. Frannie brooks no hesitation when it comes to second chances. She does not love him, he feels; but she likes him. They are friends. Every time he comes home at the end of an endless day, he feels rescued anew.
She gets into the car to drive her son to school. The boy is an easy boy who still misses his dead father. Before Frannie starts the car she unwinds the window, blows a big, cheery kiss. Her smile will sustain him over the next few hours. This is how he measures time.
He is due at work himself in two hours, though today will be a dark one. A nervous condition that comes and goes. Frannie understands. She knows that he used to be a shepherd of men, that turning into a sheep takes its toll.
His work, a cobweb of a challenge compared to what he once had, unfolds at the Good Deeds shelter in East Cleveland, a place for men who have fallen upon hard times: fallen down, fallen off, fallen away, fallen sick. He’s good at listening, and unlike the others who work there he does not tire of their tales of woe. Their putrid breath does not sicken him; their encrusted clothes make no impression. He doesn’t roll his eyes behind their backs. Without complaint he swabs toilets and traps rats and strips beds and boils rice, working like a man at Heaven’s gate. Sometimes
he prays with the men, if they ask.
The phone rings from within the house. He shuts off the hose, wrapping it quickly. He leaves nothing unwrapped, uncoiled, unboxed, unhung. By the time he clamps the hose to its hook outside the garage, the phone has fallen silent and the machine does not engage.
His wife’s son calls him Mr. Clean. With affection, he hopes. He tries so hard to shelter them, to keep the gutters clear, the driveway shoveled, the roof sealed, the grass clipped. The fridge never wants for milk; the breadbox stays full.
The boy also calls him Dad. It’s not that he doesn’t care for the boy. It’s just that it is very hard to fall for a child, knowing how suddenly they can be lost. How suddenly abandoned.
The phone rings again. Bounding up the steps, he feels better. Movement always helps. For years he did nothing but drive, across the country and back. Twenty times, stopping here two months, there eight months, working just long enough to keep moving. On the twentieth return trip he stopped in Ohio, exhausted.
As he crosses the foyer he notices a curl in the wallpaper that will have to be re-stuck. He envisions exactly where in the basement he left the bucket of sizing and the tub of glue. The kitchen looks nearly beatified at this time of day: sunlight raging through the bay window, his plants a wondrous, living green. For a moment he misses the smell of an empty church. That feeling of just him and the Eucharist, that private, shared space.
He picks up the phone. Listens a moment. His shuttered past throws itself open. Smack in his face.
When Frannie comes back for her briefcase she finds him packing.
—A niece? she asks, befuddled. You have a niece?
—She’s had an accident.
—You never told me you had a niece. Who called?
—A friend. An old friend from there.
—I’ll go with you, then.
—No.
—No? What do you mean, no? Of course we’ll go.
David and I will both go. You’ll need us.
—No, no, he says, I can’t explain right now. He puts his keys in his pocket.