Truth in Advertising (25 page)

The waitress brings Eddie's drink. He eats an olive off the pick, sips the drink, clears his throat.
Who are you
? Where's the person I knew? Where did he go? And am I different to him, as well? To Maura?

Eddie says to Maura, “How's Paul? The kids?”

Maura says, “Good. All good.”

Eddie looks down at his drink and says, “Did he say anything?” Then he looks up at me. It hits me that I've not seen him in a long time.

“No. He never regained consciousness.”

Eddie nods.

Maura and I are looking at Eddie, waiting for him to say something. The same dynamic for as long as I can remember. He's the oldest. We watch and wait and follow his lead.

Eddie says, “Were you there when he died? In the room?”

Maura exhales loudly, looks away, sips deeply from her drink.

I say, “No. It was late. I was asleep at the hotel. They called me.”

“And you went there?”

“No. I went to the hotel gym at three in the morning, did the Stairmaster.”

“Don't be a wise ass.”

“Don't ask me stupid questions.” It comes out too loud.

He glares at me across the table.

Eddie says, “Whatever. I don't really give a fuck.”

Maura says, “Language.”

I form my response and then tell myself not to say it but I say it anyway, as if I'm out of control, on a bad adrenaline rush. I'm running my tongue against the back of my lower teeth like I'm on coke. My neck is hot.

I say, “You're asking a lot of questions for someone who doesn't care.”

I can smell booze on Eddie's breath, even from where I sit. He stopped for one on the way, perhaps the only way to face us, to face this. I'm four seconds away from walking out.
This
is why we never see each other. Because every time we do we revisit the past and sit in it, unable to do anything but flail and scream and injure ourselves. So much of our conversation is unsaid, spoken so long ago. We have nothing in common but a last name and a history that won't let us go.

Again, I say the words without thinking. “Why weren't
you
there? Why weren't
either
of you there?”

They look at me like the witnesses must have looked at Eichmann on trial. Eddie, leaning across the table, face contorted. “Because he was a
fucking
prick, that's why. Because he killed . . .”

“
Stop
it.” Maura.

If you dropped the ambient noise you'd hear the three of us breathing heavily.

The waiter has a smile like he's trying out for a Broadway show.

“How are we all this evening? I'm Gareth and I would love to tell you about our specials . . .”

I cut him off. “Hi. Sorry. We're actually waiting on one more person. Maybe we could hear those in a bit.”

We sit in silence, waiting for the night to be over. I'm staring at the ceiling, so I don't see Kevin walk in. He looks at the three of us, reads our faces.

“I see we've already begun.”

•   •   •

I oversleep and have to walk quickly to the lawyer's office for the reading of the will. I pass a bank clock on the way and the readout says it is twenty-one degrees. The bellhop says I can get there faster on foot than by cab at this time of morning in this part of town. I get lost. The streets are a labyrinth in the old part of the city and I end up at the water twice. I'm frozen and stop in at a coffee shop, a pre-Starbucks time capsule.

There's a Formica counter at which sits a handful of men who look like they've worked a nightshift, drinking bottles of Miller
High Life. There is an older woman wearing two overcoats stirring her coffee and putting packet after packet of sugar into it. She has a newspaper folded to the crossword puzzle. “I read two hundred books a year,” she says to the newspaper. “I'm a writer and a poet and I've had my books published. In Israel. A rose is a rose is a rose. Who said that?”

I order a coffee to go for warmth more than anything else, and my cell phone rings. The display reads
Amy Deacon
.

“Amy,” I say rather cleverly. I'm in a mild state of shock. We've spoken once in eight months. That call did not go well. A call initiated by me, “checking in.” A mistake, having done what I did. I did it to assuage my guilt, she said.

Also, I'm not sure if it's a general low-grade nervousness in my gut or the particularly potent coffee I gulped in the lobby of the hotel on my way out, but yet again my lower intestinal tract is warming up for what appears to be an Irish jig and I fear a Four Seasons–like toilet at this establishment is out of the question. The men laugh and one says, “Sully, you're such an asshole.” Only “asshole” comes out “ahhs-hole.”

Amy says, “Hi, Fin.” I smile at the high pitch, the kindness in her voice. The older woman with two coats now seems to be staring at my crotch. I make a quick tactile examination of the area to make sure my fly is up and I've not accidentally urinated on myself, though to be frank, in my current state of lower intestinal agitation, I sense my penis retracting like wheels after takeoff.

“How are you?” she says.

We'd met on a plane. I was on my way to Cincinnati for a client meeting. Amy was headed to a conference on trauma therapy. A storm was over eastern Pennsylvania. We sat on the tarmac at LaGuardia for three and a half hours before the flight was canceled (foreshadowing?). We exchanged numbers. This was two years ago. Amy asked what my feelings were about children on the third date. I lied and said I'd always wanted them. It seemed the right thing to say. It seemed the thing normal people do: get married, have children, mow the lawn.

We started dating. We went to dinner. We went for drinks with friends (hers mostly). We went to weddings (also her friends). And during those Saturday-night weddings, dancing, too much champagne, I could see so clearly that she wanted me to ask her. And yet it was as if I were watching myself from across the room.

“What are you doing, Fin?” my alter ego would ask. This Fin is leaning casually against a tent pole, sipping a gin-and-tonic, wearing a white dinner jacket. This Fin is really good-looking and I wish I were more like him.

“What am I doing? I'm doing what people do. I'm at a wedding. I'm thinking about proposing to Amy, who I almost love.”

“You
almost
love her?” my other self asks doubtfully.

“Yes. Almost. That's the best I can do. Real love? Movie love? That doesn't exist, handsome Fin.”

“I'm not sure I agree with you, normal-looking Fin.”

“But this is what one does. I want to be a normal person. I want to do normal things.”

“You are in love with the idea of love.”

“That's terrible, terrible dialogue.”

“You're in love with the
idea
of romance, with the
idea
of Amy.”

And, of course, handsome Fin was right. Love is not the feeling you get at a friend's wedding on Martha's Vineyard on a perfect summer evening, you in a tux, Amy in a sexy dress. That's called a buzz. Love is something else.

Always, deep down, in a place I rarely ventured, I felt anything but normal. I felt damaged and wrong. I felt hollow and different. I felt I was acting all the time. We look for family. If we have none, if people scatter and die, we look for family in other forms—friends, in-laws, coworkers. I'd found that in advertising, albeit in a slightly twisted way, in New York City. Now I thought I could find it in Amy and her family, that the being-in-love-with-her part would eventually come.

That first winter together, on the sidewalk at Central Park West and Sixty-third. That's when she first told me she loved me. It was
cold. We'd gone skating. We were waiting for the light to change. We were trying to figure out what to do for dinner. I'd taken her glove off and was holding her hand, blowing warm air on it, putting it to my face.

“I love you,” she said, looking at her hand.

I stopped blowing on her hands. My expression must have changed.
And I like you very much!
I wanted to say.

I had what I'm sure was an inane smile on my face. I knew I was expected to say something in return. I'd seen the movies, read the books. My mind searched for the words, unable to simply utter
I love you, too.

What came out instead, though somehow she didn't find it odd, was, “I have love for you, too.” Like a bad Russian translation. Though what may have saved me was the fact that I hugged her as I was saying it and my voice was muffled by the furry hood on her winter coat. What a terrible thing it is to not love someone who loves you. Far worse is acting as if you do.

I went through with it, never questioning any of it, convinced that if I simply kept taking steps forward I'd be okay, that I was doing the right thing.

In bed, deep into the night, I would wake and go and sit in the kitchen, in the dark, stare out the window, hold my breath, try not to make a sound, as the escape plan hatched itself. I had money in the bank. I could pack a small bag, a knapsack, be on a flight by midday, to Poland or Morocco or Vietnam, places where a person could live for long periods of time on little money. I had researched this. The złoty. Polish money is called the złoty. In Vietnam, the dong (unfortunate). I sat there in the dark, cold coming through the windowpane, the small rattle when the wind blew, shaking, my heart racing and a strange rash under my arms. And yet I was a willing participant in this entire charade. I made this happen, me, the person who's supposed to be immune to false narratives, the person who creates false narratives for a living. “You make her happy,” Amy's mother had said. Yes, and then I made her very unhappy.

With six weeks to go until the wedding, she found me in the kitchen one night, sitting on a chair by the window, converting dollars to złoty on a pad of paper.

“Honey?” she said, the slightly confused, mildly frightened voice one uses to speak to the insane. “What are you doing?”

I hadn't known she was there and I looked up, terrified, a feral animal cornered.

“I'm fine,” I'd said, too loudly—and certainly not convincingly—considering the fact that I was naked, wide-eyed, and shivering.

Amy said, “You're scaring me.”

I had to say it. I felt like I might vomit. My palms were sweating and my heart was racing, like I'd had eleven cups of coffee.

“I'm not sure I can do this,” I said, looking at the figures on the paper in front of me.

“Do what?”

I could take it back. I could dance around it. But she knew.

The light from the streetlamp was the only light in the kitchen.

She was staring at me, her arms folded tightly across her chest. I could feel it. But I couldn't quite bring myself to look at her. Finally I said it again, slower this time, a dare to myself, to what tiny amount of courage I had left. “I'm not sure I can do this.”

She said, “Honey. People get cold feet sometimes. It's . . . it's a huge thing. It's natural to be a little scared.”

“No,” I said. “It's more than that.”

And perhaps it's the way I said it, the tone of my voice. That's the thing about a play. They're not meant to be read. You read them in high school and in college, but often they don't mean as much as when you see them on stage. You hear the actor's voice, their inflection. It's all about how we say a thing.

She stared at me, a woman looking at an accident on the highway, at a dead body, only to realize she knows the person lying there.

“What!?”

I said nothing, just looked at her. I'd hoped that she would understand what I myself didn't quite understand; that I liked her a lot but that the idea of marrying her and being responsible for her happiness
when lately, for some time, I had been unable to find any myself, well, that was just a little too much at the moment.

She'll understand
, I thought. It is one of the things that drew me to her, her empathy. This is her job, really, as a social worker, to listen and put herself in the shoes of other people, to help them help themselves.

Her face began to crinkle. She winced. Her hand went to her mouth and I realized, as she leaned back on the stove for support, repeating “Oh my God” through muffled sobs, that what she understood was that I was calling off the wedding.

That was eight months ago.

•   •   •

“I'm good,” I say now. “Yeah. I'm okay. I'm in Boston, actually.”

“Really? Why's that?”

And here a memory comes to me clear and fast. I once told Amy my father was dead.

“We're pitching Legal Sea Food. Do you know it? Amazing sea food restaurant. How are you?”

The old woman is sniffing the backs of her hands like a maniac, like she's lost a scent.

“I'm great. Do you have a minute?”

Maybe we could have a coffee or a drink, I think to myself. Maybe we could have crazy dirty monkey sex. Maybe that's why she's calling, like she once did, to describe the color and satiny texture of her bra, the demi-cup, the fullness of her gorgeous breasts. Is it possible she's been thinking about me?
So what he backed out on the wedding. Other than that he was a catch
.

She says, “I've actually been meaning to call you.”

There is a tenderness to her voice. The sadness and anger of the break-up long forgotten now. She is the kind of person who will only remember the good things—a far better, more nuanced, more emotionally mature person than I. She once said, “Fin, we all have an emotional toolbox. Our parents give us these toolboxes on our eighteenth birthday after years and years of filling them with all the wonderful tools we'll need. Compassion, patience, empathy, courage,
optimism, determination, confidence, altruism. Some of us have one of those big, red, shiny ones, like you find in the pit stop area of NASCAR races. And some have a good-sized household one. You have a little one, like a child might have. And inside there's almost nothing. Maybe just like a ball-peen hammer and a broken measuring tape. But it's not your fault, sweetie.”