This is Just Exactly Like You (24 page)

“Hi,” she says, taking the crackers, opening the box up.

“Hi.”

“Is he still watching the dying dogs?”

“He is.”

She digs a cracker into the peanut butter, looks up at him. “Then would it be alright if I asked you some questions?”

“Whatever you want,” he says. “Sure.”

“Cool,” she says. “I like that. So Beth just walked out one day?”

“Basically,” he says.

“Not unprovoked,” she says.

“No. I helped.”

She nods. “And she moved in over there.”

“Basically.”

“With your best friend,” she says. He looks around the yard, at the few flowers the old man had going, a couple of moldering bird feeders. The hedges are going to need some work. There’s poison ivy all in the fence. “All I did was move downtown,” says Rena. “I think we have a winner. I think she wins.”

“Why’s that?”

“Come on. It could have been anyone, right?”

“I guess so.”

“But no,” she says. “It’s Terry. It’s an impressive move. You have to give her credit.”

“I do?”

“I think so,” she says. “I think we both do.”

“OK.”

“You’re taking it well,” she says, grinning. “Or maybe you’re not taking it at all. Doesn’t matter. Let’s keep going.”

“Hang on,” he says. “Can we talk about how you’re taking it? Can we talk about you and Canavan? I mean—”

“More on that later, folks,” she says. “I’m not finished yet. I have more questions.”

“Why don’t you have to talk about your part?”

“I’ll talk about it. Here: He made me very sad. More than once. Now. My questions.”

“You’ll tell me?”

“When I’m finished, OK?”

“OK,” he says.

“Alright, then.” She smiles. “Promise you won’t get mad.”

“About what?”

“About what I’m going to ask.” He feels like he’s on a game show. “Because what we don’t want is you getting all pissed off,” she says.

“I won’t get all pissed off.”

“Are you sure?”

“It depends,” he says. “What are you asking?”

She takes a long sip of her drink. “I want to know why they fired you,” she says. “I always have. Tell me the real reason.”

“There’s no real reason,” he says, right away. “They just weren’t going to have classes for me.”

She points a cracker at him. “That’s also bullshit. Isn’t it? It has to be. They love Beth. They could have made space for you.”

“I didn’t have my degree. I wasn’t going to finish.”

“Bullshit again,” she says. “You could have finished. And plus they would’ve hired you anyway. Andy Baumbartener’s got a job, for fuck’s sake, and he’s only got an MA.”

“They wouldn’t have hired me. Alan was clear about that. I needed the PhD in hand.”

“Jack. Earth to Jack.” She waves at him, snaps her fingers. “It’s me. Your best friend’s girlfriend. Like in the song. I have slept on your sofa, deeply inebriated. You have refused and/or failed to take advantage of me. Your wife is half an hour away from where we’re sitting, running some kind of X-rated nursing clinic for my shitbag boyfriend. You can tell me why they ran you off.” She’s talking with her mouth full. “Because they did run you off, right?”

He’s never told anyone. Not one person in three years. He’s never discussed any part of it with anyone but Alan Sherrill. But what the hell. He’s now sitting in his auxiliary back yard. With Rena.
Pepsi is a Dachshund-Poodle cross who loves to have her ears rubbed.
“They didn’t run me off,” he says.

“What’d they do, then?”

“I kissed a kid,” he says.

“What?”

He says it again. “I kissed a kid.” It sounds very plain like that.

“No shit,” she says.

“No shit.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“Not really.”

“What, you’re not proud of it?”

“No,” he says. “I’m not.”

“Are you embarrassed?”

“I probably should be,” he says. “But no. I’m not that, either.” He’s nothing about it. He never has been. It’s always just been something that happened, like accidentally dropping a plate.

“This is great,” she says. “This is genuinely outstanding. You have to tell me who it was. Did I have her?”

“You didn’t have her.”

“How do you know? I could have had her.” She’s excited about the possibility.

“Sarah Cody,” he says.

She frowns. “I don’t think I had her.”

“See?”

“When was this?”

“Three years ago.”

“I don’t think I had her,” she says again. “Aren’t they all named Sarah Cody, though?”

“They’re all named Meghan,” says Jack.

“They
are
all named Meghan,” she says. “Perfect. OK. Follow-up question. Did you fuck her?”

“What? No, I didn’t fuck her.”

“Listen,” she says. “Don’t get all high and mighty with me. I’m not the one who felt up Sarah Doty.”

“Cody.”

“Right. More importantly, how did you achieve this? Tell me everything. Did you take her somewhere for the weekend? Or did you just both get hall passes at the same time and meet in the stairwell?”

“It was in the parking lot at Gubbio’s,” he says.

“Gubbio’s?”

“A pizza place out there. In Burlington. Some kids from a seminar I taught took me there at the end of class, once it was over. Her seminar.”

“What was it?”

“The history of political boundaries, that kind of thing.”

“You kissed a kid you had in a seminar on boundaries?”

“We were a little drunk.”

“That makes it much better,” she says, holding her cup out. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” he says.

“So what happened? She fell in love with you, and then made some kind of complaint when you didn’t love her back?”

“No,” he says. “It was just bad luck. Her roommate was Alan Sherrill’s advisee.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

“That is bad luck.”

“I know.”

“Though, for the record, ladies and gentlemen, and all the ships at sea, he did kiss the boundaries kid in the parking lot of wherever-the-fuck.”

“Gubbio’s,” he says.

“Maybe I have heard of that place. Is there a kids’ slide out front? Or one of those big bins of plastic balls to jump in?”

“Gubbio’s just has TVs and beer. No slides.”

“Video games?” she asks.

“I think so.”

“Like a little piece-of-shit college dive.”

“Sort of,” he says. “Yeah.”

“I love those places,” she says. She leans over, picks up a pinecone. “So what did Beth say about Little Miss Sarah Cody?” By her tone of voice, he knows she already knows what the answer is.

“Nothing,” he says.

She aims the pinecone at him. “Because you didn’t tell her.”

“I didn’t,” he says.

“Yeah. She would have told me.”

“She would have?”

“Of course,” says Rena. “We talk, you know? To each other?”

“Not all the time, apparently.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I suppose not.” She reaches in the cooler, gets more ice. “You want?” she asks.

“Thanks.” He hands her his cup.

She says, “You know what the saddest thing I ever saw was?”

“No.”

“One of my profs in grad school got divorced the first year I was there. Salima Baker. Expert in Coptic Greek. We were close, sort of. There was a group of us who’d have a few glasses of wine from time to time, Salima and another professor whose name I can’t ever remember and a few of the grad students. It was like a little salon. We thought we were hot shit.” A dog starts barking, and Yul Brynner picks his head up to listen. She says, “Anyway, her marriage came apart. Salima’s. She asked a few of us to help her move out, and on the day she moved, we got there, to her house, and she wasn’t even packed. No boxes. We had to pack her stuff for her. Her husband sat on the back deck the whole time drinking coffee. The only thing she’d done was get her books tied up in stacks. With twine. She had all these books stacked up and tied off in sets of ten or twelve. One of the guys, some boy, I don’t know, had a pickup, and we filled it up with the books, and like one wicker sofa and some clothes. And she had a fish. That was it. That was all she moved out with. Into this awful studio apartment she rented over by where we all lived.”

The dog stops barking. Up the street, the hammering’s stopped, too.

Rena says, “So that’s why I moved out on Terry. Why I moved out of the house.”

“What’s why?” He’s lost.

“Because I’m not ending up like that. I don’t want my books in stacks.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m telling you. I don’t want to end up like her. Like that. The whole thing was just so deeply unhappy.”

“But that’s why you moved out?”

“It’s what you and Beth are doing, right? It’s what Beth’s doing, anyway. And it must be what you’re doing over here. It’s an off-season. You’re both taking deep breaths. You’re looking at me like I’m crazy. I’m not crazy.”

“I know,” he says.

“I’m not.”

“I didn’t even know she was moving in with him until she called,” he says. “She just said she needed to get out for a while. Two weeks now.”

“Fuck that,” she says. “Two weeks is nothing. Two weeks is easy. You guys are fine. We’re all fine.”

“How is it you’re so OK with this?” he wants to know. “You didn’t seem OK last night, all full of wine.”

“I’m not OK, you asswipe, and I’m not the only one who got full of wine. What are you, from the forest?” She gets up. “You’re not getting it. Here’s how I see it, OK? This is what’s going on right now. All this, right? We go with it. We live here, all four of us, in this little bit of time. The two of us can live right here in your back yard, if you want. We’ll set up a tent. Jack Lang East, or whatever you decide to call it. And Beth and Terry will do whatever it is they do. Maybe she can move them in across the street. We’ll bake them something, welcome them to the neighborhood. A pie. Toad-in-the-Hole. We’ll all be grown-ups. All of this will be extremely grown-up.”

“There’s no way any of that’s happening.”

“Why not?” she says. “How would that be any worse?”

“I trenched your yard,” Jack says.

She turns around. “That’s about right,” she says. “When?”

“The night before he chainsawed himself.”

“Good,” she says.

“Beth was fairly pissed.”

“That’s good for her. Healthy.”

“I took the tomatoes out. By the mailbox.”

“You’re a cold-blooded killer, Jack Lang.”

He looks at her. “It’s just—”

“Just what?”

“It’s all wrong,” he says. “You know? Everything. It feels like I’m doing everything wrong. I feel like I should feel—I don’t know. What’d you say? He made you sad? I feel like I should feel sadder.”

“And you don’t?”

“I guess not.”

“Well, fuck, Jack, get sad! Be sad. That’s what this is for. Look at you. You’ve moved across the street. This is a step in the right direction. Listen to what I’m telling you: Unhappy is bad news. Unhappy is different. That’s a kind of permanent condition. We don’t want you getting unhappy. But be sad, OK? Take another week or two here and get sad. Bail out on your boys over there at Mulch City. They can run the show without you for a while. How hard can it be? You dump mulch into people’s trucks, right? Let them do that for a while.” She pours her drink out on the dirt, sets her cup on the cooler. “You know what? Track down Sarah Cody, wherever she is. Call her up. Tell her you want to see her. Old times and all that. Meet her at some interstate exit halfway between here and Maryland and buy her dinner in an Outback Steakhouse and fuck her brains out in some Econolodge. Get the room with two king beds and fuck her once or twice on each of them. Alternate between the two. What is she by now, twenty-four? Twenty-five? She’s probably still never been with anybody who doesn’t shoot his wad in ninety seconds. You’ll be a hero.”

“I’ve never fucked anybody in an Econolodge,” he says.

“See? You’re missing out. This is your big chance.”

Jack gets up, walks to the fence, opens and closes the gate to the side yard. He’s not convinced. Of anything. He says, “Why aren’t you mad at Beth?”

“I’m mad,” she says. “Who says I’m not? I’m plenty mad. Aren’t you mad at Terry?”

“Of course,” he says. “But it’s like I’m not mad enough at either of them, you know?”

“Not really, but maybe we can work on that.”

One of the windowsills on the side of the house looks like it’s rotten. He’ll have to get at that. He lives here now. He says, “How about we order food? You and me. We can rent a movie.” It’s a ridiculous move.

“No way,” she says, smiling. “Not tonight. No movies for me. I’m having one more drink, and then I’m going home. I think I ought to let you gentlemen settle into your new digs.”

“OK,” he says, relieved and disappointed at the same time.

“Don’t take it so hard,” she says. She gets the bottle of gin out of the cooler, waves it at him. “Come here. Sit down with me for the rest of the Dog Death Show. Pour me one last drink. Give me some conversation. Make a half-honest woman out of me. Tell me all about all the other teenagers you’ve gotten to throw themselves at you.”

“She wasn’t a teenager,” he says, sitting back down, handing her his cup. “She was twenty-one.” Rena is a small brushfire somebody’s set in the corner of his head.

“Twenty-one?”

“Yes.”

She pats his knee. “Well, see? That makes all the difference.”