“Nifty. Hey, great news on the job. Good luck, Ron. I’ll see you around.”
Grayson will call him Ron, maybe even Ronald, until Curly passes through this phase. Before long, his brother would fire him, and Curly would be back chugging Bali Hai mixed with gin, smoking dope on Wollaston Beach and rolling around on the mud flats at low tide.
“Where did you go last night, Grayson? Out with the fellows?”
Ronald Kerr asks this with an air of maturity so Grayson is certain he is not interested in the answer. The question is merely the fulcrum needed to seesaw back to whatever he, Ronald Kerr, wants to express.
“Nowhere, really. You?” Grayson says.
“I went up the South Shore Plaza with Nancy Anne to look for another suit. I already got a pisser one at The Bargain Center. A three-piece suit, you know, with a vest.” He pauses, waiting for the next question.
“How much that run you?” Grayson asks.
“A three-piece suit.” Kerr pauses to build the tension. “For seven bucks!”
“All right. Nice work, man.” Grayson smiles and nods with approval.
Grayson finishes getting ready, goes down the stairs quietly and out to Newbury Ave. He trots across the street to the GTO, gets in, fires it up; while he listens to the engine rumble, he torches a smoke, inhales deeply and drives away.
Grayson backs in to a parking spot next to Catherine’s LeMans in the lot at The Harvest and shut the engine down. She had parked nose in, so the two cars headed in opposite directions, and their driver’s sides were faced off.
Week nights, the waitresses got through around 11PM and usually ate together in the kitchen before they left.
He’d been waiting about half an hour when she comes out through the kitchen door, talking to Suzanne Darwin. They both stop walking but continue to talk and look back toward the kitchen as if they are concerned about being overheard. As the women talk Grayson tries to imagine his life without her and he can’t. He can only summon a still image of himself looking like a hammy, silent film actor slumped over the table in what looks like Ralph Kramden’s kitchen. He wants to talk to her about the baby, about everything being all right in their future, starting now. He’s lost his best friend, right at the time she needs him most. How can he talk about losing his best friend to his best friend? It wouldn’t work. Until recently, his life had seemed to be a long line of little screw ups, but now, this is a life changer. If she’d gotten pregnant while they were together, so to speak, it was an easy fix: Get married now, rather than later. He has to hope things will change
“Snap the fuck out of it,” he says aloud to the otherwise empty car.
Suzanne says something to Catherine, and she shakes her head. Suzanne touches her on the upper arm and cants her head to one side. Catherine gives her a quick hug and they back away from each other, still talking. On her way over to the LeMans, Catherine spots him, which put a hitch in her step, but she recovers and merely ignores him.
When she’d broken up with him, this last time, he felt gut-kicked, though he had seen worrisome clouds on the horizon; there had been signs. She began talking about it being past time to grow up. Repeatedly.
He loves her, at least he thinks he does, because he really doesn’t know what that means. All he really knows is that he misses her to the point that it hurts; when he sees her, it feels like he’s being hollowed out by a rusty fishing knife. He’d kept himself going by hoping that she would take him back. Again. Now that she was pregnant, he’d seen the fear and the anger, but also determination in her face. She was a terror when she set her mind on something.
She has her keys in one hand, her pocketbook in the other and a sweater laid over her forearm. She unlocks her car door and throws the pocketbook and sweater in, closes the door and leans back against it.
She raises her eyebrows in a question.
“I’m going to an AA meeting,” he says. “Probably tomorrow.”
She nods.
“That’s all you have to say about it? Nothing?” Grayson asks.
“You don’t want to hear what I have to say.”
“Yes, I do. I do. Say it.”
“Okay, why tomorrow? Why not tonight? Why not a week ago? Or five years ago?”
“Because it’s too late to go tonight, or last week, or five years ago.”
“It’s too late?”
“Besides, tonight, tomorrow night, what’s the difference?”
“I’m afraid the answer is none,” she says. “It makes no difference, not now.”
“You know what I meant. The difference is only a day. Not a lifetime.”
“If you put things off long enough, a day can be a lifetime.”
“So, if I had gone tonight, are you telling me tomorrow we would’ve gone out to buy a doll carriage and a Big Wheels and a house in Marshfield?”
“No,” she says. “Not now. It doesn’t matter.”
“I love you, you know,” he says.
“I know you think you do.”
“Tell me you don’t love me,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Love doesn’t matter?”
“Not by itself, no. You need more. I need more.”
“Look, let’s get married and move far away from here, like California, to some city with ‘beach’ in the name. I need to get away from all these people and their problems, they’re making me nuts. I’ll be a new man out there.”
“Stop it,” she says.
“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me what to do to make you happy and I’ll do it.”
“Leave me alone. Leave me alone, for good. I’m almost twenty-two years old and way too old, and way too tired, for all this. And it’s too late.”
She gets in her car and pulls away, leaving him behind.
As he is driving back to his apartment Grayson thinks about the different things she could have meant when she said it was too late. Then he tries to stop thinking about what she might have meant.
When he gets back to the apartment, he calls work and tells them he’s booking off, that he won’t be in tomorrow.
CHAPTER SIX
Friday morning, after three hours sleep, Grayson woke up, this time in his own bed. He celebrates by sitting on it and smoking a cigarette. Maybe a run will help. He goes to the bathroom, washes his face, brushes his teeth, and wets down his cowlick. In his room he puts on his sweat pants, sneakers and a black sweat shirt and trudges down the stairs. He runs slowly, warming up, then heads out toward Squantum. He runs faster, along the causeway, up Dorchester Street and out by Squaw Rock, and over the Long Island Bridge to the entrance of the chronic disease hospital, where he turns around and comes back.
Last night’s dream revisits him, and despite the details being fuzzier, it again manages to fill him with the same withering, sour grief.
In the dream, he’d learned she did love someone who wasn’t him, and this someone had no name. The enervating dream, and his recollection of it now while awake, was worse than the reality: It wasn’t only a dream, she really was seeing another man, but the reality of it didn’t hurt in the same way as the shivering emptiness he felt in the dream, and that feeling, now refreshed, drains him. All of which seems really fucked up. How could it be that dreaming of losing her was worse than actually losing her?
He runs up a steep hill in Squantum and across the hill, down Crabtree Rd and back to the causeway, the only way into this part of North Quincy. He gets to the boulevard and Wollaston Beach, turns left to run along the sidewalk on the water side. When he gets to his parent’s street he slows to a walk, catching his breath as he walks up to the house.
He is surprised to find his father sitting on the enclosed porch. He’s wearing his work pants and a white tee shirt and sitting in one of those brightly colored beach chairs that is a tangle of woven plastic straps wrapped around aluminum tubes. Beside him on a TV tray sits a cup of coffee, an ashtray and a pack of Luckies with a book of matches on top.
Grayson comes up
on the porch and drops himself into a high-backed wicker chair, a throne-like thing that reminds him of half a clam shell. The cushion on the chair still smelled from thirteen years of Rex, the mutt puppy born next door, and kidnapped at six weeks old by Grayson’s then ten-year old sister, Susan.
“What, are you taking the day off?” his father asks. “You must be one of the Rockefellers.”
“Yeah, I’m Ray-Ray Rockefeller.”
His father laughs. “I didn’t know there was a Ray-Ray Rockefeller.”
“Oh, sure. There’s a Ray-Ray and a Ray-Ray, Junior. But they call him Junie. You’re up early for a retired guy.”
“Unemployed, you mean.”
“No,” Grayson says. “You have a pension.”
“I’m kidding. Retired is right.”
Even though Daniel Grayson had always had a taste for the booze, he never missed a day of work for any kind of sickness, rum or otherwise, and he never drank on the job. He drank heavily a couple of nights a week but since he went to work every day nobody thought much about it. Daniel always worked hard when he was on the clock, but not for the company, not for the Teamsters union, or for God, or the USA. He worked for his family. No one had ever taught him this, but he knew how to do it. What he didn’t know was how not to do it.
“I’ve been up early since I was five years old,” Daniel says. “Ancient habit. What’s going on with you?”
“I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things,” Grayson says.
“Now’s a good time,” Daniel says. “The visiting nurse is here, bathing your mother and getting her dressed. She’s wonderful with her.”
“Can I bum a smoke, Dad?”
The Old Man held out the pack and the matches.
“How far did you run?”
“What time is it,” Grayson asks.
“Quarter after eight,” his father says.
“Maybe eight miles, a little more, a little less. About an eight-minute mile.”
“Jeez. Imagine if you didn’t smoke, the kinda shape you’d be in.”
After Paul was declared MIA, his father’s drinking problem became a drinking catastrophe and he fell into the drink like the leading edge of a melting glacier, and then bobbed in it for two years. His character demanded that he go to work every day. Some nights he drank until the bar closed. Some mornings he’d show up at work still half drunk, so the way Grayson saw it, his father’s good character did him in. It took losing his job to yank him back from the brink of losing his wife, too.
“I have some money I want you to take,” Grayson says.
“For what?”
“So Ma can get a massage every day, from a professional who does house calls, for starters. She’s stiff from being in that chair. Make the living room a bedroom, put in a first-floor bathroom, big, with a special shower. Get a ramp into the house at the side door, so you two can go outside whenever you want.”
“Boy, those are all good ideas. We can start the massages today, even. But the other stuff.” He shakes his head. “There’s no time.”
“I don’t mean you build it. We’ll have it done, by contractors.”
“You know what I mean,” his father says.
“How do you know? The doctors don’t know, but you do?” Grayson says.
“They said two or three months, and that was weeks ago.”
“That’s my point. They don’t know. No one does,” Grayson says.
“No one ever does, that’s right. What do you want me to say? You’re a bright kid, you know what’s going on. I don’t have the luxury of making believe it’s not.”
“So much for all the positive thinking you talk about,” Grayson says.
His father shakes his head and looks down. “The first AA meeting I went to, I sat there shaking, looking around, and I saw two of those little, blue cloth banners they hang around the rooms. They look like the Boy Scouts made them. One banner says, ‘Hang on,’ and on the other side of the room, another one says, ‘Let go.’ How do you do both?”
“You can’t,” Grayson says.
“You can, and you have to. But the timing is hard to learn. You can learn what to hang onto, what to let go of, and when. That’s something you need to know about living.”
“I’m talking about helping Ma here.” Grayson jumps to his feet. “You’re giving me your David Carradine, Kung Fu, ‘take the pebbles from my hand, grasshopper’, AA bullshit.”
Daniel Grayson points up at his son. “Don’t get smart with me, mister. I can still knock you on your can. What the hell do grasshoppers have to do with anything I just said?”
“Jesus Christ,” Grayson says. He throws his arms up. “Look, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
“Okay. Forget it.” Daniel points at the wicker throne. “Relax, will you. Relax.”
“No. I gotta go.”
“You’re not going to say hello to your mother?”
“Later. Tell her I’ll see her later. I have to run.”
“You’ve been running. You ran here.”
“I can’t. Not now. I have to finish.”
He pulls the screen door open, goes down the porch stairs, turns and goes back up. He stands on the top step and speaks through the screen.
“Dad, your AA sponsor? Do you know where he is right now?”
“John Minahan? He’s at work. He owns a garage on Beale St. Why?”
“Go talk to him about the whole live and let live procedure. Because you need to get off my back.”
His father got up slowly and came over to the screen door, as Grayson backs down one step, so he can see him more clearly.
His father put his hands in the pockets of his blue work pants.
“What was the other thing you wanted to talk about?” Daniel asks.
“I forget.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
His roommates aren’t home. He ate a bowl of cereal at the table while he reads the paper, and later, falls asleep on the couch. He wakes about noon, and stares at the ceiling. He is waiting for something, what, he doesn’t know, but it doesn’t matter because whatever it is it has to be better than this.
The phone rings and he picks it up.
Hugh says, “I need a hand today and Rosie says you’re off. Are you sick, busy or what?”
“What do you need?”
“I think I told you I bought a couch and it’s being delivered between three and five this afternoon. So, if you can be there to check it over and then sign for it, I’d be much obliged. Get Manny from maintenance to let you in the lobby door. I should be home between four-thirty and five-thirty, so we can grab dinner before the guys come over for the meeting. There’s a key under the mat.”
“Got it.”
Around quarter of three, Grayson sets out on foot for the ten-minute walk to his brother’s apartment. His right leg still gives him a bad time if he works it too much or if he doesn’t work it at all. He cut through the thinned woods to the parking lot at Hugh’s place. Hugh lives on the second floor in an eighty-unit, ten story apartment building that had a name; The Tradewinds. The building is about half a mile from the Neponset Bridge and the expressway into Boston. Hugh had waited for a second-floor unit to become available. He insisted on the second floor because he wouldn’t have to use the elevator, and it was somewhat difficult to break in to a second-floor unit from the outside, but it was easy to escape from it, should that become necessary. He has never said that aloud, Grayson didn’t need it to be said to know.
In the parking lot a woman is leaning into the passenger seat of a yellow 1970 Corvette soft top convertible. She stands up and turns around and he is not surprised to see that she’s gorgeous, as you didn’t see many homely chicks wheeling a Vette. He is, however, quite surprised to realize it’s Amy Nihill. How did the expensive, flashy wheels go over with her political crew? She looks different somehow, even hotter than she did on Thursday, maybe because of the Vette, or maybe it was the case of St. Pauli Girl beer she had in her grip.
&nbs
p; Grayson trots over and takes the beer from her.
“Thanks,” she says.
“My pleasure.” He hefts the case of bottled beer onto his shoulder. “I’ve heard of this beer but never saw it. It’s not available around here, is it?”
“Not just yet, but soon. Lawrence, my mother’s current husband, is in the liquor business. He’s an ‘importer of spirits.’”
She bent in to the passenger side again and came out with a clanking brown paper bag in her arms. She slams the car door closed with her foot.
“Nice ride,” he says.
“It’s a kick,” she says. “Of course, I have to take my VW bug to school and a lot of other places. I can’t have anyone questioning my values.”
He follows her into the lobby. She punches a code into the key pad by the glass door and in response the door lock makes a loud snapping noise. Inside, they go up the stairs to the second floor, accompanied by the jolly tinkle of the bottles in the box. She looks back at him, but he is quick, and when he sees her head start to turn, he drops his chin so she wouldn’t catch him admiring her ass. What an ass it is, and what a fine pair of pants she wore. Made of some kind of shiny, silky looking material, they fit her really well, and hung just right in some places and clung wonderfully in others and highlighted just the right amount of jiggle here and there.
She says, “Would you like to come over and have a girl?”
“What?”
“A St. Pauli Girl. That’s part of the marketing campaign. They want the drunks, I mean the customers, to ask, ‘Can I have a girl?’ They hope it will provide a risqué aspect to the product, enhancing sales.”
“The buxom blonde on the label should cover it.”
“So, do you want to come over and have a girl?”
“No thanks,” he says.
“Oh?” she says, cocking her head. “I’m surprised. Most guys would.”
“I’m giving Hugh a hand, signing for his new couch.”
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