The Sweetheart Deal (24 page)

W
hen I got to Boston, late, I took the T home from Logan, dropped my bags at the door, and collapsed into sleep. When I woke up at six the next morning, I felt a lot of things, but the sense of being glad to be home wasn't one of them. It was a strange phenomenon to still physically inhabit a place I'd abandoned emotionally. Being back in my apartment, surrounded by my own things, felt as unfamiliar as if I'd wandered into a stranger's by mistake, my key fitting that lock and allowing my entrance.

I didn't text Audrey like she'd asked. I wanted to hurt her in some small way, as if I hadn't enough already, and the only means I had was to deny her the only thing she'd asked of me: that I let her know I had returned safely. Not only did I want to deprive her of what she wanted, but I wanted her to wonder and worry that maybe I hadn't made it. It was childish and passive aggressive; I wasn't proud, but I was aware.

So for the second time and permanently, I was done with Boston; the rest would all be formality to put it behind me. I called my father and told him I was back and planned to take the train down to see him if it was a good time to visit, which he said it was.

The whole time I'd been in Boston, I lived in a brownstone in Brighton, off Comm. Ave.—it was a sweet place, but about as special as any sweet place in any city. Given the time of year, I was going against the tide. Faculty and off-campus students were moving in and unpacking while I packed and moved out. Fueled with coffee and music, I loaded six boxes of what I didn't want or need anymore—like a map in relief, the things I was willing to keep and pack, move and unpack, rearrange and continue to look at, wear, read, or eat off of revealed themselves, and everything else went. After I'd dropped the boxes at Goodwill, I had less to contend with and more room to do it in. What I couldn't fit in my car and haul to Goodwill I labeled
FREE
and put on the street. Within an hour the swivel desk chair I'd always hated but suffered, a forgettable bookshelf, and two lamps were gone. I spent the whole day packing, into the night, still living on Portland time, and quit at one o'clock, ten on the West Coast. The only things left in my apartment were my bed, my clothes, a coffeemaker, and one mug.

Early the next morning I took the train and stopped in New York to see the 9/11 Memorial. I had been there the previous year not long after it was completed, on my way to my father's for Christmas. It was an uncomfortable but important place to visit, especially having been there before, when the Twin Towers still stood. I had been to the city numerous times and during one visit, the Trade Center was the meeting place for friends I'd met in Europe who'd traveled to the States. But it was a different visit this time, knowing of a victim, having a hero to look for. The first responders were honored at the South Pool and I found Jimmy Sullivan's inscription there, and then his photo in the memorial exhibition. I wondered if Kevin had come back and seen it all. It was too crude a way to document them, but it was all I had, so I took pictures of his inscription and his place in the gallery with my phone. Since I would never know Jimmy Sullivan, I endowed him with qualities I imagined he had had, qualities that reminded me of Leo, which made him feel more like a friend than a stranger.

I left New York and took the train to Philadelphia. My father met me at Thirtieth Street Station and we had dinner at Bistro Romano, in Society Hill, at a table in the basement. Underground, surrounded by exposed bricks, in the most chaste terms, I told him everything, omitting Christopher's part in what had unfolded, and that I was going back to Portland, and staying.

My father never seemed surprised by much, and even when he was—by what, I couldn't imagine—I was sure he feigned the same unchanged, practiced expression. It was as though there was nothing he hadn't already heard or seen before. He could easily convey happiness or impatience or irritability, but I had never seen him shocked, and tonight was no exception. After I finished, he only nodded and smiled. As much as I'd wanted to see him taken aback by something I'd said or done when I was younger, I was grateful tonight wasn't the night it happened for the first time.

“I see,” he said. “That's quite a spot you've been in.” He didn't remind me of what he'd said to me in the airport right after Leo died, which I also anticipated and didn't want to hear. But what he did say surprised me. “Son, why Audrey? What is it about her? If it's not because of Leo, then why? And you don't have to tell me, but you need to know, in your own mind, before you do this.”

I did know, or felt, I thought. But him asking me about it so boldly, with only love and care and no trace of judgment, invited an unveiling, and I wasn't prepared for the exposure if I answered him.

I drummed my fingers on the white tablecloth, and he finished the last of his drink. “I'm sure you do know, Garrett,” he said. “And that's enough. I'm not doubting you. You're a father long enough, giving advice becomes a reflex you can't control.”

Everything I could think of was a cliché. I kept drumming my fingers and watching them.

“Because she's good for me. And because I'm afraid,” I said. I could answer his question, but I couldn't look at him while I did. “I'm terrified she was it for me. Because she's not perfect, and because she's not, she is. I like what kind of mother she is. Because if I live to be an old man, the sound of her voice is the first thing I want to hear every day. I like the way she looks at me. Because she knows most of what there is to know about me, all my flaws, and for a little while, I seemed to make her happy anyway.” My throat was tightening. “Because even though we shouldn't have—we never should have had the chance—we
work
. Worked. Because when we worked—even during those hard months—it had felt easy. Actually, that's the only thing I should have said. Because we worked.” I squeezed my head in my left hand and pressed my eyes shut several times. I still hadn't looked at him.

“Well, son,” my father said. “Then of course you have to go. It's the only thing you can do.”

I felt like he had just walked in on me with my dick in my hand, but he was as unperturbed as he would have been if he was sampling produce.

“But it's over,” I said. “I've ruined it. I ruined the whole thing. If she can forgive me, I don't know—maybe someday she can. But that's the least of it. She won't ever feel whatever she might have, or did for a little while, with me, again.”

“I don't believe it,” he said. Again, his assurance, his composure, seemed to reflect a different conversation, one that we weren't having. Like one about who was likely to prevail in the next election. “But here's the thing: for as difficult as this is on your end, uncomfortable and strange, dare I say painful, you're going to have to wait, because it's harder for her. Any and all of it. So you're going to have to wait. That's also the only thing you can do. For however long.”

Later, back at his condo in Radnor, I sat up alone till late, with a bottomless glass of Scotch, and pored over the photo albums my mother had amassed during my parents' marriage. They had a different significance for me now, and as I turned the pages, I recognized that they were full of many photos I hadn't known existed or had forgotten about. There were the basketball team pictures with Leo and me looking gangly and exposed in our uniforms as freshmen, and then less so with every subsequent season's photo.

I refilled my glass when I got to Leo and Audrey's wedding photos. My parents had attended, and there were copies of the professional shots the photographer had taken, but others caught me off guard. I didn't know who had taken them—my parents? I couldn't remember, but they must have brought a camera. My mother had filled all these albums because she always had a camera with her.

We looked so young, all of us, in the wedding party photos, surrounding Leo and Audrey, who radiated at the center of their friends on both sides. Then there was the series of me giving the toast. Initially I looked like I stood in front of a judge awaiting sentencing, then simply nervous, showing too many teeth, then finally raising my glass looking at last like myself. Some looked professional and others, of the same scenes, I could tell my mother had taken.

When I came to a photo of Audrey and me, I took it out of the black picture corners that held it in the album, and stared at it. I had no memory of it being taken, and though I surely must have, I couldn't remember ever having seen it before either. Nineteen years ago. We were in our twenties, babies. We look more like kids at our prom. In the picture, Audrey's arm is around my waist and mine is around her shoulder, my fingers pressed into her arm at the edge of the cap sleeve of her dress. I could tell that my hand wasn't resting there, loose, that my grasp had a gentle clutch to it. I'm still in my tux jacket, though I've lost the tie and my collar is open. Audrey is leaning under my draped arm, her free hand on my lapel. She is looking directly at the camera, with a candid but flawless smile, but I am not. I am looking off camera and lifting the glass in my free hand in the same direction. My mouth is open, not in a gaping, regrettable way—I was clearly captured mid-speech, attentive to whatever, or whomever, stood outside the frame. Comforted by the Scotch, I tried to think of possible captions, the audio to accompany the image: What I might have uttered, and to whom? To Leo, who was momentarily away from his bride? Or to someone else, asking about Leo's whereabouts?

Can I get a refill!

Hey, where's the good stuff!

When's the band finished their break?

But now, looking at the picture so many years later, the only quote I could attribute to myself was
I'm following her too.
Though that wouldn't have been remotely close to what I said that day, it was the only thing I could think of now.

It was a good picture, and I was happy to find the captured moment of the two of us alone from that day. But it was funny, too, in a sad way. Its composition was one that today you could just as easily have Photoshopped from two separate photographs, as incongruous as Audrey's and my presences are to the other's—like two witnesses' disparate accounts of the same accident. She is so very present and happy and comfortably tucked close to me—who is not the groom—and I, though unaware of the camera, am happy too, like a man in the stands at the Derby, offering cheers to a friend because our horse has just won. I didn't return the photo to the album and kept turning the pages until I was past the wedding ones and came to the next series, which was of a trip my parents had taken to Monaco with two other couples the same year. I stopped there, took the picture of Audrey and me into one of my father's guest rooms, put it on the nightstand next to the bed, and went to sleep.

The next morning I took my father's car and drove to the cemetery where my mother was buried. When I was twelve I found out she had been married before—
Only for about ten minutes
,
she'd said, as if that was all I or anyone needed to know in the way of the story. The parents of a classmate, not a friend, were splitting up, and although I didn't know any details, my thoughts about it had a dark hue of stigma. She'd told me about her first marriage, I thought, not so much to normalize divorce, but to cast it within the normalcy of human experience, even among Catholics. The man's name was Daniel, and his name and the mystery of his existence in my mother's life had jarred me in the same way seeing a teacher outside the classroom did: you knew teachers didn't live and sleep at school, but seeing them on the street or in a store or at the movies disrupted your sense of them and where they belonged. You didn't want to see them in a life outside the one you knew any more than you wanted to walk in on them undressing.

So I had asked my mother why, because I'd had to get a handle on reconciling this new information with the woman I'd known my mother to be five minutes earlier.

“Why what, honey?” she'd asked. “Why did I marry him or why did I divorce him?”

“Both,” I'd said.

She'd responded to me in the way that people say something they've known or at least told themselves for a long time, unspoken to all but a few people, if even that. “Well, I was twenty-one and we'd gone together a long time and thought we loved each other. Why else would we have stayed together for so long?” she'd said. “And that's what you were supposed to do, or what many of us thought we were supposed to do. It's what people did. So many of us, anyway.” She stopped and I thought she was finished before she said more, as if she had to balance the failure of those expectations with a quota of redemption. “For people who are still together, it was the right person and the right time. For them.”

“But what happened?” I'd asked. “Wasn't he nice to you?”

She'd smiled and run her fingers through my hair. “No, no. He was nice,” she'd said. “He was a very nice man. There wasn't a thing wrong with him, except that we were both too young and we didn't really even know who the other person was. I didn't even really know who I was, and as I—and we—started to figure that out, we realized we had no business being married to each other at all.”

I'd nodded like I understood, but I was baffled. I couldn't picture my mother having meals with or raking leaves with or vacationing with anyone other than my father and Kate and me. I didn't begrudge her being married before and I didn't have a judgment about it either way, but what made me feel curious and strange was that she'd been another person, with another husband, in a life other people in the world had witnessed. She'd inhabited that place, and then only later became the version of her that I knew, and part of the bedrock of the history that included me and that my own history was built on.

“So,” she'd said, as if concluding the whole
ten minutes
of being married, “we got an annulment and I was a single woman for three years before I met your father. I was twenty-five, so
old
.” She'd laughed. “Not old at all, not by a long shot, but for back then. But I was closer to who I really was than who I'd been at twenty-one, so the second time it was right. So much more right than the first.”