The Last Worthless Evening (17 page)

I sat at the desk in the smoky and shadowed room—we had not turned on a light—then I looked up Jake's number, closed the book, gazed at the window and the slow cars, forgot the number, and opened the book again. His street was not far away, and I wanted to give him time to leave before Karen walked into the house. Marsha answered, and I heard the quaver of guilt in my voice and heard it again when Jake took the phone, and beneath the warmth in his voice I heard what I knew I would see in his eyes. I asked him if we could have a talk.

“Sure, Archimedes, sure. I'm on the way.”

I waited outside, in the waning light now, and watched every . car coming from his direction. His was large, and American, and I peered at him through the window, then got in. He drove us to the ocean. I do not know why. Perhaps it was for the expanse of it, or some instinct sent him to the shore. But I do not want to impose on Jake my own musing of that day: perhaps he wanted a bar where no one knew us. He drove for half an hour, and we talked about my brothers and his and his sisters and his work at the factory. We did not mention my work or Karen or Marsha or his grown children. Now and then I looked at his face, lit by the dashboard, and his eyes watching cars and trucks, while they stared at his new life.

He stopped at a restaurant across the road from the ocean; on the beach side of the road, a seawall blocked our view of the water, but night had come, and we could only have seen the breakers' white foam. The empty tables in the restaurant were set for dinner, their glass-encased candles burning over red tablecloths; we went through a door into the darkened lounge and stood for a few moments until we could see, then moved to a booth at the wall, across the room from the bar. The other drinkers were at the bar, four men, separate, drinking quietly. The bartender, a young woman, came for the order. Jake said a shot of CC and a draft, so I did too and had money on the table when she came back, but he covered it with his hand, said, No, Archimedes, and paid her and tipped a dollar. He raised his shot glass to me, and I touched it with mine. He drank his in one motion; I swallowed some and said, “I'm defending George Karambelas.”

“Yes.”

“I've just talked to Karen.”

“Ah.”

He drank from the mug of draft and called to the bar: “Dear? Two more shots, please.”

So I drank the rest of my whiskey, and we watched her cross the floor with the bottle and pour, and he gave her money again before I saw it in his hand, but I said: My round, Jake, and gave her my ten and told her to keep one. We watched her until she was behind the bar again, then touched glasses, and I sipped and looked at his wide neck as he drank. Then I said: “I've been wondering about the boat.”

“The boat?”

“That model. How did it break?”

“I broke it. With my fist, on the desk.”

“Why?”

“How do you think he paid for it, Archimedes? You think he was a good man? An honest man? A good
doc
tor?”

“No.”

“That's why I broke it.”

“Then what?”

“He was sitting behind his desk when I broke it. He was waiting for—you know what he was waiting for.”

“Yes.”

He turned toward the bar, lifting his glass.

“No,” I said. “Finish first. Please.”

“Okay. That's when he took out the gun. From his drawer. He took it out and he worked it, so he had a bullet in there, in the barrel, and it was cocked. You know something? I looked at that big hole in the barrel, pointed at me, and I looked at that son of a bitch's face, and I wasn't scared of that gun. I think because if I died I didn't care. I can't tell you how bad I felt. You don't know; I can't say it.”

“I know.”

I took our shot glasses to the bar and she filled them and he said loudly, to my back: “Archi
med
es. That's my round.”

“I'll run a tab,” she said. I noticed then that she wore glasses, and in the light behind the bar was pretty, and I wanted to be home with Paula, only to lie beside her, and to sleep. I spilled whiskey on both hands going back to the booth.

“She's keeping a tab,” I said.

Jake nodded, and raised his glass to mine, and I smelled more whiskey than I drank.

“He told me to leave. How do you like that? He's doing that to my daughter and giving her those pills, and he says to me, leave. Go home. So I didn't move. I came to talk to that son of a bitch—”

“He was certainly that, Jake.”

“Yes. And you know how they are, those rich doctors, all the rich people, they're used to saying leave, go home, and everybody goes. So what's he going to do, Archimedes? Shoot me? Of course not. He's got the gun and he's behind his desk, but
still
he has to listen. Because I'm talking to him, Archimedes; I'm telling him things. So he gets mad.
Him
. And he comes around the desk with that gun, and I tell him I'll shove that thing up his ass. Then I hit him. But, Goddammit, he hit his head. On the corner of his desk there, when he went down. Just that once. I hit him just that once, and the son of a bitch cracked his head. I can't feel bad. For him. But let me tell you, since that night nobody talks in my house. Marsha and Karen, they just go around sad. And quiet. Jesus, it's quiet. We talk, you know; we say this and that, hello, good morning, you want some more rice? But, oh Jesus, it's quiet, and me too. I've just been waiting. You see, when they blamed it on George, I knew I had to go tell them. Every night, I'd say to myself: Tomorrow, Jake. After work, tomorrow, you go down to the station. Then I'd go to work next day, and when five o'clock came I'd drive home. I couldn't leave them. My family. I don't mind being punished. You kill somebody, you go to jail, even if he's a son of a bitch. But every day I couldn't leave my family.”

“Monday,” I said.

“What about Monday?”

“Let's do it Monday. That'll give you two days to raise bail.”

He drank the rest of his beer, then leaned over the table.

“How much?”

“Probably five thousand for the bondsman.”

“I can get it.”

“I could ask my brothers,” I said. “You might need ten, but I doubt it.”

“No. I have some family. And I have friends.”

He slid out of the booth, stood at the table's end, held two mugs in one hand, the glasses in the other.

“Well,” he said. “Okay. Yes: Monday.”

He went to the bar, tall and wide and walking steadily, and I wanted to tell him not to bring me another shot, but I could not keep that distance from him, though my legs under the table felt weak, as if they alone, of my body, were drunk. Then he paid her, so this was our last drink, and I imagined Paula in the warm bedroom, lying on the bed reading her philosophy book, glancing at her watch. When Jake sat across from me, we raised the glasses, and I said, To Monday; then we touched them and I drank mine in one long swallow, exhaled, and drank some beer.

“You said let's,” he said.

“What?”

“ ‘Let's do it Monday.' What did you mean?”

“I don't charge much,” I said. “I don't charge anything at all, for a good Armenian.”

“Really? You? You want to be my lawyer?”

“Jake, you'll never see the inside of a prison.”

“
No
.”

“I'm sure of it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What about George?”

“He won't be my client anymore.”

“But this weekend. He stays in jail?”

“Only till Monday. What the hell: he shouldn't drink so much.”

His smile came slowly and then was laughter that rose and fell and rose again as we walked out of the dark lounge, to the parking lot and the smack of breakers beyond the seawall and into his car, where pulling down his seat belt, he turned to me and said, “Come to the house and have dinner.”

“Another time,” I said. “I've got a woman waiting at home.”

He squeezed my shoulder, reached across me and pulled my seat belt over my chest and snapped it locked, then started the car and turned on its headlights and slowly drove us home.

Molly

for George Gibson

ONE

W
HEN
C
LAIRE'S HUSBAND
left her and their daughter, she was twenty-five years old and Molly was three. By the time she was thirty Claire knew other men like Norman, knew them because their sad wives were her friends. These men were absolutely competent in their work, even excellent, better than others because more committed or obsessed. Or possessed. But they and Norman could not be husbands and fathers, unless their wives and children wanted little more than nothing, or little more than what money gave them. So Norman had left to be free, to work as an anthropologist all the way across the country in California, as if he needed that distance between him and Massachusetts to make final his leaving. Every month he sent Claire a check drawn on the Wells Fargo Bank in Pacifica. After receiving the third check, she divorced him.

Norman was a tall, angular man who appeared clumsy: a coffee cup in his large and bony hands seemed to be in its last moments before fragmentation; a car in his control looked alive, like a horse that senses his rider is a novice and is deciding whether to be gentle and patient, or a rascal. But he was not clumsy. He moved that way, looked that way even at rest in a chair, because he seemed to live always in a world that was not physical. Or nearly always. At his long table in his large cluttered den he studied artifacts and catalogued them, and his hands and face then, his sloping shoulders and long arms, reminded her of a pianist's. To him, his den was not cluttered: it was perfectly in order; but that order was for Claire an accumulation of objects that she knew were part of her own history in America and with Norman but now, unearthed and collected, had no connection with the world she lived in.

She prepared meals that he ate as a pet dog eats its dry food, out of hunger while knowing there is better food he would gobble if only he could get it. But for Norman there was no better food. He did not smoke, and before dinner he drank whatever she did, and he took his alcohol as he did his food: quickly, and without visible pleasure or lack of it, and always moderately. Some evenings, with what she believed at the time was mischievous curiosity, she mixed herself a bloody mary or salty dog and gave him only the seasoned tomato juice or salted grapefruit juice, and he drank these, fooled and never knowing it. Then she realized he would not care if he did know it, and with scorn but fear too she saw him not as a fool but as a creature who needed almost nothing that she did. After that she nightly gave him juice and doubled the vodka in her own drinks, wanting to drink his portion as she sat across the living room from him, and Molly played on the floor between them and Claire drank until she was drunk: a drunkenness she masked so well that he could neither see nor hear it. She sat talking as though sober and smelling the food on the stove and in the oven and wishing he would suddenly die, drinking grapefruit juice in his large chair where he could not look comfortable, where his long arms and legs shifted and jutted out and would not rest in the chair's sturdy depth.

He touched and held Molly, and spoke to her, as absently as he ate and drank and drove and touched everything that was part of their lives. Before she began wishing for his death, she had at times felt compassion for him as she watched him with Molly, saw him as though deprived of his sense of touch and so removed from the world and condemned to move in it on a chair with motor and wheels. Also, during that time, she often read in his den while he worked at night, after his workday was over, and he had drunk his two drinks and eaten his dinner. She sat in a chair across the room from him, facing his profile at the table, and sometimes she lowered the book to her lap and with yearning sorrow that dampened her eyes she watched him fondle the old bottles and potsherds and crusted iron, the only things she ever saw him fondle, and she wanted his hands like that on her flesh. This was early enough in the marriage for her sorrow to include him, for her to feel that his steadfast lack of proportion was a curse on him too, and gave him pain he could neither voice nor heal. And then her sorrow included hope too: that as he grew older, toward thirty, and attained some of the achievement he wanted, he would change, would become a whole man whose pleasures as husband and father were two-thirds of his fulfillment instead of the third or fourth or even less they were now.

On one of those evenings she admitted they were less. She did not admit this so much as she was finally no longer able to deny it: the truth of it rose in her and she fought it, tensed her muscles against it; then she tired and with a sigh he did not hear at his table, she surrendered to it. She and Molly could vanish tonight, and his life would move on, move in the direction he believed was forward. This man, whose only physical appetite was sexual, who left his desk for bed and her body and excited her with the extremity of his only passion away from his work, who plunged and panted and gasped and groaned, was nothing more than an anthropologist who was beyond hardworking, who was even a bit mad, and after his work he was a good fuck. Soon she started serving him juice before dinner and watched him from her secret and vengeful drunkenness, and spoke to him, made the sounds of marital exchange that she had once loved, those words whose function was not so much to inform but to assure, to celebrate even, the communion between a woman and a man; and she looked at him dangling in his chair and wished he were dead.

So he had left her and Molly long before he took his body and artifacts and other possessions with him, took them from Massachusetts to California. Always he sent the monthly check, inside a folded and blank page of white stationery. She assumed the checks would stop arriving on the first of each month when he realized that Molly was eighteen or twenty-one, whatever age he had in mind. Or perhaps the money was for her, and it would keep coming until he died or she did, and if she died first whoever did such things would find him through his bank (there was no return address on his envelopes) and tell him it was over now, he could stop. He might have married out there, but she could not imagine it. Because he had left to be free, and for him freedom was selfishness, while for her it was being able to live each day without violating her conscience. She came to believe this after he left, when for the first time in her life without parents or a husband, and so without another adult between her and the world, she had needed a conscience, a place in her spirit where she could stand with strength, and say yes or no. When Molly was nine, Claire told her: “I grew up when he left.”