Belly (31 page)

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

—Daniel Wallace, author of Big
Fish