by Tom Perrotta
Kermit gazed at Tom with the bleary fascination of the permanently stoned. He had long, greasy yellowish gray hair that he liked to groom with his fingers when he was deep in thought. Rumor had it that he was a former English professor at B.U.
“You know what we should call you?” he said. “Jack London.”
The bestowing of nicknames was serious business at the Mandrake. In the few weeks he’d been hanging out there, Tom had already been dubbed Frisco, Your Excellency, and, most recently, North Face. Sooner or later, he thought, something would have to stick.
“Jack London.” Eggy murmured the name, testing it on his tongue. “I like that.”
“I read a story by him,” said the girl. She looked like a part-timer, round-faced and healthy, with the biggest bullseye on her forehead Tom had ever come across, a green-and-white swirl the size of a beer mat. “In high school English. This guy in the North Pole keeps trying to light a fire so he won’t get hypothermia, but the fire keeps going out. And then his fingers freeze, and he’s totally fucked.”
“Man versus Nature.” Eggy nodded sagely. “The eternal conflict.”
“There are actually two versions of that story,” Kermit pointed out. “In the first one, the guy survives.”
“So why’d he write the second?” the girl asked.
“Why, indeed?” Kermit chuckled darkly. “Because the first version was bullshit, that’s why. In his heart of hearts, Jack London knew that we can never build a fire. Not when we really need to.”
“You know what’s gross?” the girl asked cheerfully. “The guy wanted to kill his dog, cut it open, and warm his hands inside the guts. But by the time he tried to do it, he couldn’t even hold the knife.”
“Please.” Eggy looked a bit queasy. “Could we not talk about this?”
“Why not?” the girl asked.
“He’s a dog lover,” Kermit explained. “Hasn’t he told you about Quincy?”
“I just met her last night.” Eggy sounded indignant. “What do you think, I meet someone and immediately start blabbing about my dog?”
Kermit directed an amused glance at Tom, who knew all too well how often Eggy talked about Quincy, a two-hundred-pound mastiff who’d wandered off after the Sudden Departure and hadn’t been seen since. Instead of a wallet, Eggy carried a small album containing about a dozen photographs of the big dog, often in the company of a tall, unsmiling woman with scraped-back hair. This was Emily, Eggy’s departed fiancée, a former graduate student at the Kennedy School of Government. Eggy didn’t talk so much about her.
Kermit reached for the dice. “It’s my turn, right?”
“Yup.” Eggy pointed to a white blot on the middle bar. “I just took this guy prisoner.”
“Again?” Kermit looked pissed. “You could show a little mercy, you know?”
“What are you talking about? Why should I show any mercy? That’s like telling a football player not to tackle a player on the other team just because he has the ball.”
“There’s no law that says you have to tackle someone.”
“No, but you’d be a shitty football player if you didn’t.”
“Point taken.” Kermit shook the dice. “But let’s not remove free will from the equation.”
Tom rolled his eyes. The Barefoot People he’d known played different games in different cities—Monopoly in San Francisco, cribbage in Harrisburg, backgammon in Boston—but no matter what they played, the action always unfolded at a glacial pace, interrupted at every turn by pointless disputes and obscure philosophical digressions. More often than not, the games ended in midstream, called on account of boredom.
“I’m Lucy, by the way,” the girl told Tom. “But these guys call me Ouch.”
“Ouch?” Tom said. “Where’s that come from?”
Eggy looked up from the board. He wore round wire-framed glasses that, along with his shaved head, gave him a monkish air.
“She was one of the original Harvard flagellants. You know about that?”
Tom nodded. He’d seen a video on the Internet a while back, a procession of college kids marching through Harvard Yard in their bathing suits, mortifying their flesh with homemade whips and cat-o’-nine-tails, some of which had nails and tacks affixed to the business end. Afterward, the kids would sit on the grass and rub ointment into one another’s backs. They claimed to feel purified by their agony, temporarily cleansed of their guilt.
“Wow.” Tom looked at Ouch a little more closely. She was wearing a pale blue cotton sweater that looked freshly laundered. Her complexion was clear, her hair fine and soft, like she still had access to showers and a meal plan. “That’s pretty hard-core.”
“You should see her scars,” Eggy said with admiration. “Her back is like a topographic map.”
“I saw you idiots once,” Kermit told her. “I was sitting outside at Au Bon Pain, beautiful spring day, and the next thing I know, a dozen kids are lined up on the sidewalk like an a cappella group, yelling out their SAT scores and flogging the crap out of themselves. Seven Twenty, Critical Reading! Whack! Seven Eighty, Math! Whack! Six Ninety, Writing! Whack!”
Ouch was blushing. “We did it like that at the beginning. But then we started to personalize it. Somebody would scream, Lead role in Godspell! and the next one would say, Congressional Page! or Lampoon Staff! I had a really long one: Two-Sport Varsity Scholar-Athlete!” She laughed at the memory. “This one guy who came a couple of times, he used to scream about what a stud he was, and how proud he was about the size of his penis. Eight Inches! I Measured It! I Even Posted Pictures on Craigslist!”
“Fucking Harvard guys,” said Eggy. “Always bragging about something.”
“It’s true,” Ouch admitted. “The whole idea was that we were supposed to be atoning for the sins of excessive pride and selfishness, but we were even competitive about that. This one kid I knew, all he ever yelled was I’m the Biggest Asshole Ever!”
“There’s a tall order,” said Kermit. “Especially at Harvard.”
“How long did you keep this up?” Tom asked.
“Couple months,” she said. “But where can you go with something like that? It just doesn’t lead anywhere, you know? After a while, you even get bored with the pain.”
“So what happened? You just throw away your whip and go back to school?”
“They made me take a year off.” She gave a vague shrug, like it wasn’t worth talking about. “I did a lot of snowboarding.”
“But now you’re back?”
“Technically. But I’m not really going to class or anything.” She touched her bullseye. “I’m more interested in this right now. It seems like a really good fit, you know? A lot more social and intellectual stimulation. I think I need that.”
“More sex and drugs, too,” Eggy added with a smirk.
“Definitely more of that.” Ouch looked a bit troubled. “My parents aren’t too happy about it. Especially the sex.”
“They never are,” Kermit told her. “But that’s part of the deal. You gotta break free of those middle-class conventions. Find your own way.”
“It’s hard,” she said. “We’re a really close family.”
“She’s not kidding,” Eggy informed them. “They phoned last night while we were fucking and she took the call.”
“Hello?” asked Kermit. “Ever hear of voice mail?”
“That’s our agreement,” Ouch explained. “I can do whatever I want as long as I answer the phone. They just want to know I’m alive. I feel like I owe them that much.”
“It goes way beyond that.” Eggy sounded genuinely exasperated. “They talked for like a half hour, this big convoluted discussion about morality and responsibility and self-respect.”
Kermit looked intrigued. “While you were fucking?”
“Yeah,” Eggy grumbled. “It was a real turn-on.”
“They made me so mad.” Ouch was blushing again. “They wouldn’t even concede that casual sex is healthier than hurting myself. They kept tryi
ng to draw a moral equivalence between the two, which is so ridiculous.”
“Then—get this—she put me on the phone.” Eggy pretended to shoot himself in the head. “She made me talk to her parents. I’m naked with a fucking hard-on. Unbelievable.”
“They wanted to talk to you.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t want to talk to them. How do you think I felt, getting interrogated by these people I never met—what’s my real name, how old am I, am I practicing safe sex with their little girl? Finally I just said, Look, your little girl’s a consenting adult, and they’re like, We know that, but she’s still our child, and she means more to us than anything in the world. What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?”
“It’s just because of my sister,” Ouch told him. “They still haven’t gotten over that. None of us have.”
“Anyway,” Eggy said wearily, “by the time she got off the phone, I didn’t even feel like fucking anymore. And it takes a lot to make me not feel like fucking.”
Ouch gave him a look. “You got over it pretty fast.”
“You were very persuasive.”
“Ah,” said Kermit. “So there was a happy ending after all.”
“Two, as a matter of fact.” Eggy’s expression was smug. “She’s quite the scholar-athlete.”
Tom wasn’t surprised by this—Barefoot dudes bragged about their sexual exploits all the time—but he couldn’t help feeling offended on Ouch’s behalf. In a world that made any sense, she wouldn’t even be talking to Eggy, let alone going to bed with him. She must have sensed his sympathy, because she turned to him with a curious expression.
“What about you?” she asked. “Are you in touch with your family?”
“Not really. Not for a while.”
“Did you have a fight?”
“We just kinda drifted apart.”
“Do your parents know you’re alive and well?”
Tom wasn’t sure how to answer that.
“I probably owe them an e-mail,” he muttered.
“Whose turn is it?” Eggy asked Kermit.
Ouch took out her phone and slid it across the table.
“You should call,” she said. “I bet they’d like to hear from you.”
AT THE GRAPEFRUIT
NORA BOUGHT A NEW DRESS for Valentine’s Day and immediately regretted it. Not because it didn’t look good; that wasn’t the problem at all. The dress was lovely—a blue-gray silk/rayon mix, sleeveless, with a V-neck and empire waist—and it fit her perfectly right off the rack. Even in the dispiriting light of the changing room, she could see how flattering it was, the way it emphasized the elegance of her shoulders and the length of her legs, the pale matte fabric calling attention to the darkness of her hair and eyes, her enviable cheekbones, her finely formed chin.
My mouth, she told herself. I have a very pretty mouth. (Her daughter had had the exact same mouth, but she preferred not to think about that.)
It was easy to imagine the looks she’d get in that dress, the heads that would turn when she walked into the restaurant, the pleasure in Kevin’s eyes as he admired her across the table. That was the problem, the ease with which she’d allowed herself to get swept up in the excitement of the holiday. Because she already understood that it wasn’t really working out, that she’d made a mistake getting involved with him, and that their days together were numbered—not because of anything he had or hadn’t done, but because of her, because of who she was and everything she was no longer capable of. So what was the point of looking this good—better than she had any right to, really—of eating a nice meal in a fancy restaurant, drinking expensive wine and sharing some kind of decadent dessert, starting something that would probably lead to bed and then end in tears? Why put either of them through that?
The thing was, Kevin hadn’t given her any advance warning. He’d just sprung it on her a few days ago as he was heading out the door.
Thursday at eight, he said, as if it were already set in stone. Mark it on your calendar.
Mark what?
Valentine’s Day. I made reservations for two at Pamplemousse. I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.
It happened so quickly and felt so natural that it hadn’t occurred to her to object. How could she? He was her boyfriend, at least for the moment, and it was the middle of February. Of course he was taking her out to dinner.
Wear something nice, he told her.
* * *
ALL HER life she’d been a sucker for Valentine’s Day, even back in college, when a lot of people Nora respected treated it like a sexist joke at best, a Hallmark fairy tale from the bad old days, Ward bringing June a heart-shaped box of chocolates.
Let me get this straight, Brian used to tease her. I give you flowers and you spread your legs?
That’s right, she told him. That’s exactly how it goes.
And he’d gotten the message, too. Even Mr. Post-Structuralist had brought her a dozen roses and taken her out for a dinner he couldn’t afford. And when they got home, she held up her end of the bargain, a little more enthusiastically and inventively than usual.
See? she told him. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
It was okay, he conceded. I guess once a year won’t kill me.
As she got older, she realized there wasn’t anything to apologize for. It was just who she was. She liked being wined and dined, made to feel special, liked it when the deliveryman showed up at the office with a big bouquet and a sweet little note, and her female coworkers told her how lucky she was to have such a romantic boyfriend, such an attentive fiancé, such a thoughtful husband. That was one thing she’d always appreciated about Doug: He’d never failed her on Valentine’s Day, never forgot the flowers, never acted like he was just going through the motions. He enjoyed keeping her off balance, surprising her with jewelry one year, a weekend at a luxury hotel the next. Champagne and strawberries in bed, a sonnet in her honor, a home-cooked gourmet meal. She understood now that it was all for show, that he was probably rolling out of bed after she fell asleep and writing steamy e-mails to Kylie or some other other woman, but she hadn’t known that at the time. Back then every gift had seemed like one more nice gesture in a series that would go on forever, a tribute she deserved from the sweet man who loved her.
* * *
THERE WAS a candle between them and Nora’s face looked younger than usual in its flickering glow, as if the tension lines had been erased from the corners of her eyes and mouth. He hoped the soft light was doing him the same favor, giving her a glimpse of the handsome fellow he used to be, the one she’d never had a chance to meet.
“This is a nice restaurant,” he said. “Really down-to-earth.”
She glanced around the dining room as if seeing it for the first time, taking in the rustic decor with an air of grudging approval—the high ceiling with exposed beams, the bell-shaped light fixtures suspended above rough-hewn tables, the plank floor and exposed brick walls.
“Why do they call it the grapefruit?” she asked.
“Grapefruit?”
“Pamplemousse. It’s grapefruit in French.”
“Really?”
She held up the menu, pointing to a big yellow orb on the cover.
He squinted at the image. “I thought that was the sun.”
“It’s a grapefruit.”
“Whoops.”
Her eyes strayed toward the bar, where a festive crowd of walk-ins was clustered, waiting for some tables to open up. Kevin couldn’t understand why they all looked so cheerful. He hated that, killing time on an empty stomach, not knowing when the hostess would wander over and call your name.
“Must’ve been hard to get a reservation,” she said. “Eight o’clock and everything.”
“Just good timing.” Kevin shrugged, as if it were no big deal. “Somebody canceled right before I called.”
This wasn’t precisely true—he’d had to call in a favor from the restaurant’s wine supplier, who’d started out as a salesman for Patriot Liquors—but he d
ecided to keep that information to himself. There were a lot of women who would’ve been impressed by his string-pulling abilities, but he was pretty sure Nora wasn’t one of them.
“I guess you’re just a lucky guy,” she told him.
“That’s right.” He tilted his glass in her direction, suggesting a toast without insisting on it. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
She mimicked his gesture. “Same to you.”
“You look beautiful,” he said, not for the first time that evening.
Nora smiled unconvincingly and opened her menu. He could see that it was costing her something just to be here, exposed like this, letting the whole town in on their little secret. But she’d done it—she’d done it for him—and that was the important thing.
* * *
HE HAD to hand it to Aimee. Without her encouragement, he never would’ve forced the issue, wouldn’t have had the courage to nudge Nora out of her comfort zone.
“I don’t want to push her,” he’d said. “She’s a pretty fragile person.”
“She’s a survivor,” Aimee had reminded him. “I bet she’s a lot tougher than you think.”
Kevin knew it was an iffy proposition, taking relationship advice from a teenager—a high school dropout, no less—but he’d gotten to know Aimee a lot better in the past couple of weeks and had come to think of her more as a friend and a peer than as one of his daughter’s classmates. For someone who’d made some pretty bad decisions in her own life, she actually had a lot of insight into other people and what made them tick.
It had been awkward at first, the two of them alone in the house after Jill left for school, but they’d gotten past that pretty quickly. It helped that Aimee was on her best behavior, coming downstairs wide-awake and fully dressed, no more sleepy Lolita in a tank top. She was polite and friendly and surprisingly easy to talk to. She told him about her new job—apparently, waitressing was a lot harder than she’d thought it would be—and asked a lot of questions about his. They discussed current events and music and sports—she was a pretty big NBA fan—and watched funny videos on YouTube. She was also curious about his personal life.