The Grief of Others (16 page)

“Not for me, man.” But Lance sat back down.

John called for two shots of Cuervo—again not like him—and, upon failing to persuade Lance to have his, consumed both and declared, jabbing a finger festively toward the ceiling,
“Otra más!”

“All right,” Lance said with some resolve, after John had nursed his second beer chaser for some fifteen minutes. He slapped the bar. “Come on, we got work.”

“You know what I am? Honestly?”

“What?”

“Three sheets to the wind. Hey.” He slapped the bar, too. “Did you know that?”

Lance took John’s Corona and drained it. “No.”

“The sheets aren’t really the sheets. The sails. Did you know that? They’re ropes. They’re the ropes that tie down the other things, what do you call them?”

“What?”

“Sails! That’s not what the sheets are. Don’t ask me why. Now me, I’m saying, I’m three sheets to the wind.That’s three ropes, get it? The ropes that tie down the . . . shit. What are they? The things. You know what I’m trying to say.When the ropes go to the wind, the. Uh. The. The
sails
. Go flopping and the ship goes off course.
Like a drunk.
” Completing his thought with enormous satisfaction, John snatched up his empty bottle and tried for a drink.

“More like four, by my count,” Lance muttered drily.

“Actually”—John turned to contradict the younger man with pedagogical flair—“that’s wrong. Four’s unconscious.”

“We gotta go.” Lance pulled out some cash. “I have a floor to paint.”

“As do I.”

“I don’t know about that. I’m thinking I’ll drop you home first.”

“No, no. That’s crap.” John, too, pulled out several bills, which he placed on top of Lance’s, taking great care to line up the corners neatly, yet none to check their denominations. “Come on!” He clapped his hands together once, louder than he’d intended; all around Mero Mayor’s the customers, deeply unexcitable men all, glanced over.

Lance plucked John’s contribution—four crisp twenties—from the pile and stuffed the bills back in John’s coat pocket.

“Hey,”
John discovered warmly, “you’re Antonio, and I’m Sebastian!” He was back in
Twelfth Night,
the shipwrecked sailor rescued by the sea captain.

Lance gave half a grin. He nodded thanks to the guy behind the bar and, with three fingers on John’s back, propelled him toward the exit.

The air had turned cold and dark; it seemed to bear down on them. It was ribboned by a quick, snipping wind as they made their way to the Miata.

“Your car’s no boat,” John observed forlornly as they reached it.

Lance unlocked the doors and got in.

“Not many people know about this place,” John declared, although now he was addressing no one. A car sped by, its engine noise rising, then fading. What he meant was that Ricky didn’t know about this place. He didn’t think so anyway. Mero Mayor was the sort of place he could imagine her driving by any number of times without actually seeing it. It was quintessentially male; nothing about it had been designed to appeal to women. A low white cement building, brown-roofed, hung with a string of yellow and red fiesta lights that managed to project an aura that was precisely the opposite of festive, and, at any given time of day, a handful of clunkers parked out front. On some level John liked it for this very reason, the fact that it was unknown to Ricky; but on another level this caused him anxiety, the thought that she had no idea—
could have
no idea—where to find him.

“Yo, Sebastian,” Lance prompted. John opened the door and tucked himself into the passenger seat, drawing up his knees and elbows, feeling his frame pressed tightly against the limits of his space. And as if the act of self-compression had triggered a wave of sadness, he felt himself suddenly fighting—not
tears
, certainly, but a dizzying melancholy, which welled and surged through him and then as suddenly ebbed. He worried that Lance must have noticed, as if the wave of sadness were an odor or a noise he’d emitted.

All this, and the quantity of alcohol he’d imbibed, made it several minutes before he realized they were driving toward Nyack, not Congers. “You can’t take me home, man.”

“You can’t operate machinery.”

“No machinery—we’re painting.”

“I’m not sure you can operate a paintbrush.”

John drew a breath. “Look,” he began. And sighed. He would not argue the point. Lance was probably right in principle, although John firmly believed—
knew
, actually—that he could, in fact, operate a paintbrush. But all right: he would be an acquiescent, a dignified drunk. “Look,” he said again. “Listen. I’m going to spend the night in my office.”

His declaration was less dramatic than it might have been, since pulling the occasional all-nighter was a part of the job. He kept in his office, for that reason, an old foam love seat that unfolded into a lumpy bed. His declaration was merely unorthodox. Given his current state. Given the fact that they both knew he would not be contributing to the work of set construction this night.

Lance made no sign of having heard him, but at the next turnout did a K-turn, let a few cars pass, and then pulled out again, crossing over to the far lane and heading back toward Congers.

“’Preciate it,” whispered John. “I think my wife’s having an affair.” The thought had not actually occurred to him; he was surprised to hear the words come out of his mouth. Did his drunkenness know something his sobriety did not?

She had done it before, adultery. Though maybe not technically, since they hadn’t been married. Though fuck technically. Infidelity was infidelity. His devastation could not have been greater had it happened post-wedding. The blow of discovery had been oddly somatic, like a two-by-four to the groin, and it was compounded by the awful banality of the sequence: suspicion, inquiry, denial, retreat; suspicion, inquiry, confession, disintegration of the known world. He remembered sooty tears, the sordid cliché of it, the mascara streaking her cheeks as she’d begged his forgiveness, not seeming to understand that this was a matter beyond his control. It made as much sense as begging for someone to love you. As though it were something you could choose.

When he explained that it wasn’t as simple as that, as simple as making a decision, she’d had the gall to try putting the affair in just those terms: as something she hadn’t actively decided upon, but that had “happened” of its own inviolable accord. The guy was some Wall Street coworker asshole; Ricky herself called him that. John never laid eyes on him and was glad. Ricky didn’t care for him, she said. It had been a “thing,” that’s all, the word she used to dismiss it, and John saw it in his mind as just that: a shiny, dangling, tangible thing, a piece of tinsel, maybe, and she a witless magpie who couldn’t help herself. The image didn’t help. She tried giving him some song about its inevitability, how she hadn’t even wanted it; how in a way she felt he, John, had expected it of her; how her actions had been predicated on his own self-serving perception of who she was. She was a maestro of crazy feminine logic, he had to give her that.

Lo and behold, in the end he found he did forgive her. That, too, a thing beyond his control, something he contrived neither to do nor to resist. He forgave her, loved her, married her, made a family with her, and still he was not certain he’d ever trusted her again. It was not trust he felt so much as faith he exercised. But maybe that was true of all marriage. “Fuck me if I know,” he said out loud. And then repeated, as though he needed to experience again how the words sounded, “My wife might be having an affair.”

“Dude.” Lance sighed. “Just to mention, you’re wasted.”

“That’s true,” John agreed. Then: “You think I’m wrong?”

“Look. What you and your wife have just been through must suck. I’m just saying you’ve probably got to be . . .
delicate
. You know? Give yourselves a break, some time, or some . . . I don’t know, just some fucking
delicacy
.”

It seemed an unlikely word, coming from Lance. Both words, actually. Fucking and delicate. In New York, their first apartment, he and Ricky’d lived above a delicatessen. Old school, Italian, sausages hanging from the ceiling, the whole bit. When she’d been pregnant with Paul, Ricky used to ram her bare feet in her rain boots and go down in pajamas to buy jars of stuffed peppers. Then she’d sit in bed and eat them, one after the other, putting a whole stuffed pepper in her mouth and working at it, lips gleaming with olive oil. He liked to watch her eat them and she ate them ostentatiously for him. Erotically, roguishly. Her mouth stuffed with the delicacy. In her delicate condition. Her indelicate condition, he had loved to watch, and she had loved it, loved him. What had happened to them? What had happened since then?

“Maybe you’re right,” said John. “Maybe she just doesn’t like me anymore.”

Lance did not reply. They turned in to the campus, wound around buildings and pulled up outside the theater. There he said, “You could crash with us.”

Us meant Lance and his fiancée, with whom, John knew, he shared an apartment in Haverstraw. John had never been to their place, but imagined it furnished sparsely, optimistically, in Ikea and Target. He had met the fiancée only once, at the faculty holiday party. He could not retrieve her name just now, but remembered having thought she must be a student. She was Brazilian, agreeable, and attractively plump, as though the extra weight were no more than a surplus of youth. The thought of encroaching on her innocent hearth, denting her affordable modular sofa with his tequila-sloshed bulk, horrified him.

“No, no,” John said. “Thanks.”

He did not expect Lance to try to persuade him, and when the younger man added, “Estrela would be okay with it,” he was touched and appalled. He felt an urge to seize Lance by the shoulders, to counsel him to be more doubting, less confident; to warn him of all the unseen dangers waiting to suck happiness out of life.

“You don’t know,” he heard himself propounding. He realized he was shaking his head from side to side in a manner that struck him, even in his current state, as comically equine. “You don’t know anything, man. I’m saying that because I care about—about you. I care about you guys.”

Lance smiled, nodded in the direction of the dashboard.

“Listen,” implored John. He understood that he was rambling but he had an imperative—this much was suddenly clear—to impart a single profundity. An epiphany. He clapped his hands together again, held them clasped. “Lis—Listen to what I’m telling you. If you don’t listen to anything else I say”—here he paused, momentarily distracted by the beguiling sound of
elsisay
—“Else. I. Say. Listen to this: don’t think you know—don’t give up your couch, man—don’t—your couch—” He’d lost the thread of the message, but not the vehemence; on that he retained a firmer grasp than ever. “I’m saying don’t ever offer your couch, man—hold on, hold on to your couch.”

“Thank—”

“Don’t let it get
away
from you.”

“Okay, come on now.” Somehow Lance had materialized on the passenger side of the car; he stood holding the door open. John swung a leg around, worked to free the other from the little space. He began to raise himself, lost his balance. Lance extended an arm and helped hoist him upright.

“Antonio,” John remembered.

“That’s right.”

“Antonio.” Very fondly.

“Let’s go.”

With care and a sense of virtue John shut the door behind him, then teetered and buckled against it as if buffeted by the wind, thrown off his very course.

F
eet up on the chair, knees drawn in, her eyes five inches from the book in her lap, wisps of hair come loose from her barrettes to form a fuzzy nimbus around her face, Biscuit read:

The office of the dead?

She pictured a large metal desk flanked by filing cabinets, a window behind with blinds drawn, blocking out all but a hint of flashing neon sign. A cloaked, hooded figure enthroned on a swivel chair, feet up on the desk, cigar burning in the ashtray, scythe leaning against the wall, old-fashioned rotary phone getting ready to jingle.

She herself was occupying an office at the moment: that of the children’s librarian, Mrs. Mukhopadhyay. Just beyond the door, which was not shut, Mrs. Mukhopadhyay chatted with young patrons and their caregivers at the circulation desk. It was a rainy Saturday; prime time in the children’s room. “How are you feeling?” one mother after another kept asking in knowing, confidential tones while Mrs. Mukhopadhyay scanned the bar codes on their books.They all said virtually the same things, as if reading from a script: a string of hopefuls auditioning for a bit part—“Are you tired? You look great.”

Biscuit paid scant attention to the content of Mrs. Mukhopadhyay’s replies, listening mostly to the rise and fall of her voice. She believed Mrs. Mukhopadhyay possessed the prettiest voice in the world. Sometimes at home, alone in her room, Biscuit would stand before her full-length mirror and chat sotto voce with her reflection in her best approximation of the librarian’s Bengali lilt. It was a water voice, trickling and eddying and cool.

Tucked into the librarian’s chair, half listening to her converse just outside the office; listening, too, to the Brahms chamber works wending softly from the librarian’s portable CD player, Biscuit breathed contentedly over the fat book on her lap. It was from upstairs, the adult stacks. It had truly hundreds of pages. Nearly a thousand. Wafery, yellowed, vanilla-smelling pages that fell with a dense
plunk,
like a plank, when you flipped over a great sheaf at once.