Whenever You Call (25 page)

He shook his head. “I don’t know why.”

“I told you why.”

I said, “You didn’t tell me.”

“Because he was widowed just two months ago.” Her small chin puckered. “Too soon, too soon.”

“Apparently not,” he said.

“I didn’t know his first wife had been a total
bitch
, you see. He didn’t mention that on his Match.com profile. He didn’t say, “Please understand that my former wife, now dead, was a
bitch
.”

We all laughed together this time.

I said to him, “I can see why you like her.”

“Love her!”

I noticed Annie at the end of the bar. “Excuse me,” I said.

When I got down there, Annie asked for a diet coke. She could’ve ducked under and gotten it herself since there were no diners yet, but I silently took a glass, scooped ice into it, and squirted the right hose. I wasn’t all that annoyed since I got a kick out of the drink hoses; they were satisfying to manipulate, probably because of their phallic quality, and I never got tired of the noise they made: a satisfying
phlat
sound, plus the bubbles. They did make me think about Ravi. No hose there. Even so, I wasn’t ready to decide one way or another. Maybe hoses were overrated.

I returned to the older couple and asked whether they planned to eat dinner with us.

“What do you want to do?” he asked her.

“Could we have dinner here at the bar?”

Ravi had warned me that they weren’t thrilled by bar-eating at the Harvest, but they couldn’t risk bucking the trend, either. So I was encouraged to discourage it, while simultaneously letting it happen, if need be.

“Sure,” I said. “Let me know when you want to see the menu.”

My cell phone, hooked to my waistband, gave a little cha-cha-cha. I tilted it to see who was calling, then walked quickly to the furthest end of the bar when I saw that it was Elliot.

He said, “Are you at work?”

Although I was worried that he’d somehow be offended by my presence at a bar, I wasn’t going to lie. “Yes, honey.”

“I just wondered whether you called Grandpa.”

“Yeah, I did. He wants to come to the funeral.”

Elliot’s voice wobbled. “That would be nice.”

“Elliot?”

“Yeah?”

“Will it be all right for me to come, do you think?”

He sighed and then swallowed. “I asked Genevieve because I figured you’d want to.”

“I would, yes.” I glanced around the dining room and bar, checking that I wasn’t needed somewhere, but at 5:15 p.m., it was still pretty quiet.

“She asked that you not come, Mom.”

“Oh dear.”

“Obviously, Alex, Noah and I are upset, but we don’t really see what we can do about it.”

“Maybe if I called her tomorrow, when the shock isn’t quite so strong—,”

He interrupted, “Better not.”

“It makes me feel like she believes something terrible about me.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does—,” I stopped talking, suddenly remembering the words of Brother Ralph at the monastery.
Ask yourself as if the answer doesn’t matter.
“You’re right, it
doesn’t
matter, not in the grand scheme of things. Selfishly, I’d like to have been there, but if it’s not to be, it’s not to be.”

“Thanks.”

“If you have the time, why don’t
you
call Grandpa? He sounded pretty shaken, and you can let him know about the funeral arrangements and that I won’t be there.”

“Okay. Talk to you later.”

Just as I closed the phone and slipped it back into its harness, a loud noise erupted near the front entrance into the restaurant. The door opened and a vast crowd of people surged through, clearly an extended family celebrating a birthday, anniversary, or engagement. I took a deep breath and rushed back to the other end of the bar to plunge several martini glasses deep into the ice. It was going to get very busy in a matter of minutes.

As they milled around, waiting to be seated at the three tables that had been pushed together to form one large table, the group gave off a strong heat and smell. Their faces gleamed with sweat and I could even see that the damp hair around their napes and foreheads. They’d brought the brutal summer inside. I heard the air-conditioning click on, working to bring down the temperature.

I felt my own heat rising, caught by theirs, and as I waited for the orders to flood in, I watched Ravi bustling about in an effort to get everyone happily seated. She had a quality I’d describe as mesmerizing, something often to be found in women from a middle-eastern or eastern background. Effortlessly, or at least, unconsciously, they moved and spoke in a way that cast a spell. I’d frequently noticed this sort of woman, and acknowledged her seductiveness, but I’d never felt it for
myself
, as if I were the intended target. She caught me looking and threw me a funny little smile just as she picked up a chair and swung it over her head. Quite the feat since she was tiny and small-boned.

Annie arrived at the bar, her face flushed. “You’re not going to believe it, but they’re all having the
same thing
,” she said.

Let it be wine, I thought.

“Twenty cosmopolitans.” She pulled a face. “Sorry.”

Suddenly Ravi was hopping under the bar’s divider. “I’ll help,” she said.

I teased, “Do you know how to make a cosmopolitan?”

“You bet.”

We packed shakers with ice, then leapt to see who could be the first to grab the citron vodka, triple sec, cranberry and lime juices. We measured, poured, and found ourselves, at exactly the same moment, shaking the shakers. I gave her the eyeball, raised the shaker high above my head, and did a little dance. Immediately, she matched me, and soon we were shaking and pouring in unison. The large table caught on and began to clap in time. I glanced down the bar to where the older couple had been, expecting that they’d be thrilled by all the excitement, but they were gone. Later, after the cosmopolitans had been served, and I’d cleaned up the considerable mess, I went to collect their glasses, fully expecting that there would be, at minimum, two twenties left for me. There was nothing. I’d been stiffed, for the first time ever, and by a sweet old couple who’d met on Match.com.

I began to harbor ill thoughts about Match.com. The organization, through no fault of my own, was out to get me. Indeed, it began to seem to me that my entire life—all those marriages and myriad bed partners—could be seen as a part of Match.com’s campaign to inform me that I had no match, would never have a match, and, indeed, it had gotten to the point of non-matchhood that I was now considering a lesbian lover even though, frankly, I really
wasn’t
a lesbian (I might be able to be sexually aroused by same-sex action, but I’d never fall in love with a woman … one of those things I knew without a doubt).

They’d drained every last
free
drop of Beefeater gin from their glasses, I noted. As I wiped the countertop clean, I started to laugh. Then, to cry. I thought of Trevor and how, together, we’d made three kids and now he was dead. I thought of me, being alone. Al didn’t count, obviously, especially since I knew he was going to fall in love with his new agent, Christine. I bet they were out drinking together at that moment, in fact. I tried to tell myself that nothing mattered, but it sure seemed like many things mattered. I swiveled to face the back of the bar and quickly dabbed at my eyes with a paper cocktail napkin.

Still, I asked myself as if it didn’t matter. I asked myself,
Why am I alone?

Then I forced myself to smile, to shrug in a devil-may-care way, even to trip lightly down the bar on my toes, doing a little dance. By the time I’d reached the end, where Annie waited with new orders from a table of four just seated, the answer had come.

You are not alone.

Yes, I am, I argued in my head. Al doesn’t count and my husbands are gone, and I’m not talking about my kids, ’cause they’re launched anyway, and all I have is this angel I’ve probably imagined, and a bad guy named Rabbitfish who’s got plans to murder me. Furthermore, this wasn’t about my father or siblings. This was about
Love
.

Annie said, “Two gin and tonics, a chardonnay, and a vodka tonic.”

“Seasonally appropriate ordering, at last.”

“You okay?”

I waved a nonchalant hand. “That sweet old couple left without paying.”

“You gotta tell Ravi right away.”

“Yeah, I will.”

You are not alone.

This was not an actual voice I heard. It was my thought, stated clearly, which was why it was rapidly pissing me off. I had no one to whom to address my anger, except myself. I made the drinks in an unseeing flurry. When Annie came to get them, she towed Ravi along.

She said, “What happened?”

“The old couple who came in early left when we were doing our
thang,
without settling up.”

Ravi shrugged. “It happens. I just wished I’d gotten a better look at ’em.”

“Listen, Ravi, I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to go out.” I thought about explaining more, but I didn’t really understand what the
more
was.

Her dark brown eyes glanced at me sideways, sly and calm. “No problem.”

“Thanks.”

I saw Annie at the end of the bar, waiting to give me an order, and I managed to get lost in the actions of bar tending, the shaking and pouring, the crush and chill of ice, the corks popping, the dull clacking sounds of my heels on the linoleum floor, the odor of beer froth and tonic water. It was almost like falling asleep and dreaming. So much for bar tending being a door into real life. At odd moments, when things were quiet, I looked around for Ralph. Was it possible that I missed him?

I
HADN’T SPOKEN TO Jen in thirty-one days.

I hadn’t spoken to Al in ten days.

I hadn’t heard from Rabbitfish in twenty-nine days.

Trevor had been cremated and then buried for twenty-five days.

Naked, I sat in my desk chair and spun around until I was close to falling off. I veered between two feelings, loneliness and freedom, with each of them somehow being a part of the other so that when I was lonely, I was free, and when I was free, I was lonely. I kept taking my phone off the hook as insurance that I wouldn’t hear from Al. We hadn’t had a fight, or even a discussion about our relationship. Instead, he simply left my house one Sunday morning, after a fun Saturday night in bed, and then neither of us called. For a few moments every day, I missed him in an abrupt, violent way, almost as if I just needed to smell him. But the rest of the time, I never wanted to see him again. Perhaps I was being my usual over-imaginative self, but I felt strangely certain that he was harboring lust or interest in Christine, his agent, though he’d been matter-of-fact about her when he’d returned from the meeting in New York.

I was naked because a steamy bath, with the electric heater blowing hard in the bathroom, had made me so hot that I almost passed out. So I’d flung open the bathroom door and staggered to my desk chair. Spinning around, I cooled quickly, and now I was cold. Late October in a two-hundred-year-old house. I grabbed my nightgown and bathrobe from the back of the bathroom door, then pulled on thick socks.

In front of the computer, with my legs tucked up under the flannel nightgown, I checked my e-mail, expecting to receive only spam, especially since it was three o’clock in the morning. I was sufficiently in need of human connection that I was actually
hoping
for some interesting spam. I’d last checked ten minutes before, when I’d first emerged from the bathroom. Usually, after a night of bar tending, I’d have gone to bed as quickly as possible, kicking off shoes, yanking down panty hose, jerking too hard at the zipper to my skirt, pulling the tight top over my head with such alacrity that my hair got knotted in the arms, and everything turned inside out. But this night was different. Despite the busyness of a Saturday evening, I felt untouched by people. Ravi, who’d become a bit of a friend after I told her I couldn’t have a date with her, had been out sick.

I’m in a terrible funk, I thought as I hit the Inbox icon. Things twirled for longer than usual, so I expected junk. Instead, there was an e-mail from Rabbitfish.

Since I hadn’t heard from him for so long, my fear that he would murder me had melted away, only to be replaced by something I should probably have feared more: desire for him. How could I so want someone I didn’t know? The only explanation was that I
did
know him, as I’d told him, perhaps too many times.
I think I know you, I think I know you, I think I know you.

I should know better, of course. After three marriages and countless love affairs, I should know
way
better than to fall in love with a stranger, particularly a stranger who’d behaved badly by reading my e-mail, lying in wait for me (okay, call it stalking), leaving curious messages that weren’t readily understood, and sending me obscure e-mails.

I pushed away from my desk without reading his e-mail, though I also didn’t discard it. Up two flights of stairs, in the kitchen, I pulled vodka, martini shaker and glass out of the freezer, vermouth from the ’fridge, and made myself a martini. Then down to the living room, where I threw a fake log, along with several real logs, into the fireplace, on top of pieces of crumpled-up newspaper, struck a match and lit it. I curled into the corner of the couch, without turning on any lights, pulling a cozy throw over my lap. The flames were slow at first, tiny flickers on the edges of the fake log, burning the paper cover before finally catching hold of the actual log. I took a tentative sip of the martini, wondering how it would taste now that I made so many of the damn things as my livelihood, but it’s icy metallic taste echoed something in me, this strange mood of longing and anger and fear.

What if I never recovered from this guy, Mr. Rabbitfish? So far, he’d been such a unique experience that it didn’t seem like an exaggeration to see him as my fatal flaw, the thing, like alcohol or drugs, over which I’d developed such an addiction I would never be able to recover. I tried to imagine deleting his e-mail forever, without reading it, and I knew that I couldn’t. I simply could not
not
read his message. Wasn’t this pull toward him something to fear? I thought so. I knew so. And I was at its mercy.

If only it
was
merciful.

By the end of the martini, the fire was burning merrily and sleepiness finally crept over me. I was scared to get up and head for the bedroom because I knew I’d find it hard to resist the temptation to go downstairs and read the e-mail from Rabbitfish. Instead, I slid down on the couch, stretching out my legs and tucking the throw neatly around my body to seal in the warmth. I stared at the fire for a few more minutes until my eyes grew so heavy that they had to close.

Behind my eyelids, I jumped awake, as if I was the ubiquitous rabbitfish itself swimming underwater, snapping its frightening jaws at anything that moved, or even didn’t move. I began to see (or almost
to write)
a long scene and dialogue with Jen. We were in the well-known restaurant, Mistral, in the Back Bay. She wore a haughty expression on her face as she tasted the wine I’d chosen, but I knew her look was really directed at me, not in judgment of the wine.

I said, “Ralph hasn’t been around.”

“Who’s Ralph?”

“My angel.”

She shook her head, the pure blond hair swinging sideways like pleats of a skirt. “I’m glad it’s over, but I’m still worried about you.”

“What makes you say it’s over?”

“Because the angel—as you call this hallucination—is gone.”

I picked up my glass of wine and took a long sip, rolling it around in my mouth before slowly swallowing. “I miss Ralph.”

I opened my eyes to stare at the fire, then around the room, searching for my angel. Out loud, I said, “Are you here?” No flashing blue lights, nothing at all. Despite the fire, I felt surrounded by only a cold emptiness, like the inside of an oven that’s been off for days.

I spoke again. “You’re not coming back.”

I shut my eyes against the rush of tears. I must have done something wrong, I thought, first, to have such a strange-looking angel and, second, for the angel to leave me after I’d finally seen him. Or I was merely nuts, no matter what my therapist thought.

It occurred to me that it didn’t matter, which reminded me of Brother Ralph’s advice.
Ask the question as if the answer doesn’t matter.
What’s the question, I asked as if it didn’t matter. I closed my eyes again and smelled the smoke and burning wood. The question was in the fire, I thought; the question was
of
the fire. My eyes slammed open and I sat up on the couch.

Fire: creation and destruction.

The question,
as if it didn’t matter,
was which one? Creation or destruction? The choice was mine. And, if the question didn’t matter, then the answer didn’t either. I felt my chest fill with air as I sucked in a huge breath.

“Please come back, Ralph,” I said.

Then I threw off my blanket and practically ran downstairs. When I clicked on the mail icon, I was dumbfounded to discover there was
no
e-mail from Rabbitfish waiting in my Inbox. Frantic, I searched everywhere.

Had I imagined the e-mail, with the tantalizing return address of “Rabbitfish?” If I could hallucinate a bizarre angel like Ralph, couldn’t I also hallucinate an e-mail? The problem was that no matter how I tried to convince myself otherwise, I didn’t believe I’d imagined the e-mail from him, though I also knew that didn’t mean I
hadn’t.

I could write to Rabbitfish myself and ask what had happened to the e-mail he sent earlier, but, in truth, I didn’t want to. I’d developed what I considered to be a healthy anxiety about this Rabbitfish character, and I wasn’t comfortable being the instigator of any communications between us. Yet, oh my word, how I wanted to know what he’d written. I rechecked all the possible places his e-mail might have landed, but it had disappeared.

In the living room, the fire was dying out. I could throw on some more logs, but it was now quarter-to-four in the morning and I desperately needed to get some sleep. I crawled between the flannel sheets on my bed, where the electric blanket had turned them into hot toast. I lay still for a long time, determined to give my body a chance to unwind, but it didn’t work. Twenty minutes later, I was still awake.

Suddenly, inspired, I jumped out of bed and ran back down to my study. When I checked my e-mail, there it was: Rabbitfish.

It’s in the fire.

Shock ripped through the center of my body. My breathing went shallow. How could he have known? How, how, how? My palms sprung little leaks all over and I wiped them on my nightgown, then grabbed the fabric in my fists, clutching it tightly, screwing it into fists to fit inside my fists.

Finally, I wrote back.

There is something eerie going on. Please tell me why you wrote “It’s in the fire.”

Since it was now almost four-thirty in the morning, I didn’t expect a reply. I used the bathroom, and then heard the boinging sound to indicate that I’d received an e-mail. I wiped myself slowly. Flushed. Stood and felt my nightgown drop in sweet, gentle folds to my sock feet. Shuffled forward.

An e-mail had arrived, yes, but it wasn’t from Rabbitfish. Instead, the return address was “[email protected].” That would be, I realized, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I opened the mail.

Who are you?

I swallowed. My eye travelled to the e-mail from me, to which he was responding, and it was precisely the e-mail I’d just sent to Rabbitfish (“There is something eerie going on. Please tell me why you wrote ‘It’s in the fire.’”), but the address of the recipient was, indeed, Joseph Finder at MIT. I quickly googled his name and MIT and discovered that he was a Professor of Religious Studies. His photo looked nothing like my Mr. Rabbitfish, though he was quite handsome, with thick, unruly white hair and a long face wearing a devilish expression.

I clicked on Reply and began to type.

I sent the e-mail you received to a correspondent named Rabbitfish. Well, that’s probably not his real name, but it’s his moniker and the only name I know for him. I have no idea how or why you received my e-mail, nor do I understand why you’re awake at this ungodly hour.

He answered within a minute.

What’s in the fire?

(I don’t know why I’m awake at this ungodly hour, either … do you know why you’re awake?)

Something about the hour of night, or morning, and the strangeness of what had happened to the e-mail I’d sent to Rabbitfish, made me lose all inhibitions. I wrote back:

I’m awake because I feel alone. My angel, Ralph, seems to have disappeared, and I was only just beginning to get used to him.

Naturally, I figured I’d never hear from Joseph Finder again. But, not so.

I have an angel named Ralph. Do you think it’s the same angel?

Sweat trickled between my breasts. I pressed the fabric of the flannel nightgown to blot it. I knew he must be joking, yet it seemed possible, given all the other oddities occurring, that he wasn’t joking at all.

Are you joking?

His answer came rapidly, in an IM message.

“I’m not, actually. Are you joking about your Ralph?”

“No.” I hit send, paused, then kept writing. “You believe in angels?”

“Yes. Normally, maybe not, except that I happen to know my angel and his name is Ralph. He’s not much help, though.”

“I don’t think my Ralph has been much help, either. I’m curious: does your Ralph have bags under his eyes?”

“Yes! and no feet and big brown furry wings!”

“You’re a real person, writing to me?”

“I’m a tenured professor at MIT. I don’t know what’s going on either, but we should probably meet.”

“Are you married?”

“No … you?”

“Not at the moment.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I tend to marry a lot. It’s a problem.”

“Laughing.”

“Yeah, you can laugh. Not me.”

“Are you free for a drink tomorrow night?”

“Suppose so.”

“Don’t sound so enthusiastic.”

“This is unusual, to say the least.”

“You mean fun.”

“Well … maybe.”

“How about Miracle of Science Bar & Grill at 6:00?”

“Appropriate, she said dryly.”

“Is that yes?”

“That’s yes. See you at 6 tomorrow.”

“How will I know you?”

“Do a google image search and you’ll find plenty.”

“Ciao.”

“Okay. Tomorrow.”

I ran up the stairs two at a time, with my nightgown hiked so high that my ass was entirely exposed. Throwing myself into bed, I actually bounced a bit, tickled by this turn of events because I was
positive
the promised happy ending to end all happy endings was right there, within my reach if I would just risk it. I laughed out loud and waited for morning.