Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction (24 page)

“In a pig’s eye,” Randeane said, and she shoved the bagels in a bag and threw Ray’s change on the counter.

Before winter started, Ray bought a dog. (“Do you even like dogs?” Eleanor said.) He walked it every night past Randeane’s house. Often Randeane was reading on her front porch; sometimes she was around the back, where she had a hammock, an outdoor fireplace, and two white plastic lounge chairs.

“Hammock or chaise longue?” Randeane said.

Ray said that he was more a chair kind of person, that hammocks were unpredictable.

“Oh, life’s a hammock,” Randeane said.

“Exactly my point. I’ll take the chair.”

“Remember Oscar? You met him once. He’s asked me to marry him,” Randeane said.

Ray sighed.

“Don’t sigh,” she said.

“That’s what Ellie says to me. She says, ‘Don’t sigh, Ray, this is not the Gulag.’ You know what else she says—after a few drinks, she says, ‘Ray, I promised to love you for better or worse.’ No one should make such a promise. I don’t think I even know what it means—for better or for worse. Why would you be married to someone for worse?”

“You don’t think I should marry him?”

“I met him once,” Ray said. “Firm handshake.”

“Come lie in the hammock.”

“I can’t do that,” Ray said.

“I’m pretty sure you can,” Randeane said. She kicked off her green slippers and climbed into the hammock. Her pants pulled up to her calves. “At least you can push me.” Ray gave her a push and sat down again.

“You could marry me,” Ray said. “We both know I’d be a better choice.”

Randeane looked up at the sky. “I guess so,” she said. “You, younger, single, maybe not so deeply pissed off and inflexible.”

“I don’t think we’ll be seeing that,” Ray said, and he stumbled a little getting off the chaise and took the dog home. He drove to The Yankee Clipper for a beer.

The parking lot was barely half full and Ray knew most of the cars. Leo Ferrante’s BMW, that would be Leo, celebrating having persuaded the people in charge of Farnham that neither a Stop & Shop nor a horse crematorium was anything to get upset about. Leo would be drinking with his clients and sitting near Anne Fishbach. Every Tuesday night, Anne left her senile husband with a nurse and drove over to the Clipper. (“Aren’t I allowed?” she’d said to Ray. “Does this make me a bad wife? After fifty-three years?”) She sat in a back booth and drank Manhattans until someone drove her home.

Ray recognized his next-door neighbor’s green pickup. He saw two guys from the Exchange Club walk out of the bar and recognize
his
car and Ray knew enough to go somewhere else. He drove about ten miles and pulled into a town he’d been to only once, twenty years ago, to pick up Jennifer from a Girl Scout jamboree. There were two bars, on either side of the wide main street. One awning said
PADDY O’TOOLE’S BAR AND GRILLE
and had gold four-leaf clovers in the window and on the awning. The other said
BUCK’S SAFARI BAR
and had a poster of Obama in one window and in the other, a poster of a black girl, with an enormous cloud of black curls, standing with her oiled legs apart, falling out of a tiny leopard-skin bikini. Ray thought, When it’s your time, it’s your time, and he went in.

No one minded him. Back in the day, some young man might have felt compelled to defend his manhood or his blackness or the virtue of a waitress and Ray might have found himself scuffling on a wet wood floor or a hard sidewalk, but not now. A young woman and her date slid off their barstools into a booth and the man indicated that Ray was free to take the man’s seat. The barmaid was short and wide, wearing a gold leather skirt and gold nail polish. Her hair was cut close to the scalp and dyed blond. She put a napkin in front of Ray and looked at him the way she looked at every other man at the bar.

“Just a beer, please. Whatever’s on tap.”

He could stay in Buck’s all night. He could probably move into Buck’s. They seemed like nice people. They were certainly a lot more tolerant of an old white man in their midst than the people at the Clipper would be if some strange black guy bellied up to the bar. Ray ordered another beer and a burger and he watched the Steelers crush the Colts.

“Christ,” Ray said, “no defense at all.”

“I hear you,” the man next to him said, and someone tapped Ray on the shoulder.

Ray’s elbow tipped his glass and the man to his left caught it and the barmaid said, Good catch, and Macy was standing beside him.

“What in Christ’s name are you doing here?” Ray said. “Where’s Neil?” In the five years since the wedding, Ray had never seen Macy take a drink, let alone in a black bar at the ass end of Meriden.

Macy shrugged. “I used to live around here,” she said. “I took a drive and … You want to get a booth?”

“I would,” said the man on Ray’s left. “I would definitely get a booth.”

“She’s my daughter-in-law,” Ray said.

“Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone,” the man said.

“I thought you were from Iowa. Kansas? Was I wrong?” Ray said, when they’d brought their beers to a table.

“No. I said my parents were dead and I had an aunt and uncle in Des Moines. Which I don’t.”

Macy drummed her fingers on the table.

“I love Neil,” she said. “I really do.”

“I’m sure you do. And he loves you. Christ, you have only to look at him—he thinks you hung the moon.”

“Really? He wants to have a baby.”

“Good,” Ray said. “Have two.” Babies having babies, he thought.

“He thinks I hung the moon? He’s the best man I know,” Macy said. “I’m just not who he thinks I am.”

“That’s not the worst thing in the world,” Ray said, and Macy put her hand, cool and wet from the beer, over his lips. Her hand smelled like grapefruit.

“I don’t mean he doesn’t know my essence on some metaphysical level. I mean I have lied to him on a million different occasions about a million things.”

Ray nodded.

“When I was ten, my mother fell down on the kitchen floor, and blood was pouring out of her nose. So, you know, I understood she was OD’ing on coke.”

Ray nodded again, like women OD’ing on coke in front of their children was as much part of his life as reading the paper.

“I had this amazing babysitter, Sammy. So—I don’t want this to take forever—when I’m fourteen my mother moves in with this guy, we’ll just call him The Asshole, and I moved in with Sammy. It turns out, Sammy’s a transvestite.”

Ray nodded again; he had defended a dozen middle-aged guys in dresses who were caught speeding.

“So, I do Sammy’s hair and nails. And I do his friends’, too, and Sammy basically sets me up in the tranny business in our TV room. I do hair, nails, and makeup every day after school and most of Saturday. When I graduate from high school, I have three thousand dollars in my savings account. Plus, I got into Bryn Mawr on scholarship
and
I graduated second in my class.” Macy smiled shyly. “My name’s not Macy. I changed it—I mean I changed it legally, when I was sixteen. Sammy’s mother’s name was Macy. So when we get to Bryn Mawr, Sammy is just the
shit
. All the parents
love
him. He drives off and he goes,
Au revoir
, honeybun, and don’t look back. He got a horrible staph infection, from the acrylic nails. Ten days in the ICU. It was terrible. He was a really, really nice man,” Macy said, wiping her face with a beer napkin.

“When I was in college,” Ray said, “I let a guy give me a blow job. Let me be clear. This guy paid me fifty bucks, which was a lot of money at the time, and I let him do me once a week for three years. If not for him, I would have had to drop out of college. You already know my father was a bum.”

“Thank you,” Macy said, and she laughed. Ray smiled.

“Also, you might already know this—I’m in love with Randeane.”

“I really like her,” Macy said. “Everything about her, she’s just so great. She’s read everything.
I’m
sort of in love with her.”

“Maybe,” Ray said. He sighed and spread his arms along the back of the booth. “I’m pretty sure not like this.”

One morning, Ray told Macy, he’d gotten to Randeane’s late, between the morning people and the lunchtime people, and there was a man sitting at Ray’s usual table.

Oh, Ray, Randeane said. This is my friend, Garbly Garble. Ray couldn’t make out the man’s name. He was taller than Ray, in his late thirties or early forties; it was harder and harder for Ray to tell anything except that someone was more or less his age. People under fifty looked like young people and people under thirty looked like children. The man stood up politely and shook Ray’s hand. He shook it twice, not the hard handshake that even men Ray’s age gave one another just to show they were still in the game, but a very gentle, slow handshake as if he was mindful of Ray’s osteoporosis or arthritis or some other damned thing that would make Ray’s hand crumble in his like an Egyptian relic. The man was clearly not thinking, So, this is the competition; he was thinking, Poor old Uncle Ray, or even poor Grandpa Ray, Civil War veteran. Nurse, get this man a chair. Ray walked out and across town to the office of Ferrante and Ticknor, Attorneys-at-Law. He walked along the narrow, cluttered river that ran through the park.

In Leo Ferrante’s office, Ray cleared his throat and Leo put his hand up.

“Don’t,” he said.

“What, you’re psychic?” Ray said.

Leo said he was sorry, that in the past three days he’d had two old friends come in to divorce their wives and marry hot chicks.

“I wouldn’t call her a hot chick,” Ray’d said.

Macy leaned forward, her face in her hands, lit up with the thought of Ray’s love for Randeane. She looked about twelve years old.

“You deserve happiness, Ray.”

“And Eleanor? What about her happiness?”

Macy did not say that Eleanor’s happiness was of no account to her.

Ray said, “Someone’s got to speak up for Ellie,” and he looked around Buck’s as if the gold-haired bartender or the young couple might say something on Ellie’s behalf. Like: Goddammit, that woman has—in her own way—devoted herself to you. Or maybe the bartender would say, Leave Ellie and your children will turn their backs on you. They think you’re a good man. Leave Ellie to shack up with a young lady from the coffee shop, half your age. No fool like an old fool. Ray turned back to Macy but he could still hear the bartender and Leo Ferrante talking to him. Your prostate alone’s enough to scare her off; you gotta get a guest room just to keep it somewhere. And your suitcase of Viagra and Levitra and don’t forget the Allopurinol and the Amlodipine and the Flomax, without which you’ll never piss again. And why shouldn’t she want children, young as she is? She could have them with that tall, good-looking man, Ray heard the bartender say, and he looked at her and she winked, gold powder sparkling on her eyelids and cheekbones, shining across her breasts. She brought them another pair of beers and a bowl of nuts.

“Do you have any food?” Macy said.

“What do you like?” the woman said.

Macy looked around and she sniffed the air.

“Catfish, maybe,” she said.

The woman shrugged pleasantly. “For two? Sweet-potato fries? Butter beans?”

“I have died and gone to heaven,” Macy said, and she almost clapped her hands.

“I don’t think I can eat all that,” Ray said.

“I love it. I’ll bring some home for Neil. Like they say, so good, makes you want to slap yo’ mama.” Macy took a sip of beer and smiled. “Sammy was a great cook. Actually, I’m a great cook.”

Turned on a dime, Ray thought. Two hours ago, she was going to hang herself in the garage because Neil didn’t know her essence; now she’s bringing him a Southern fried feast and they’ll eat in bed. Laughing. Ray thought of Randeane and his heart clenched so deeply, he put his hands on the table.

“You
should
bring some home for him. I really can’t eat that stuff anymore,” he said. “Call him. Tell him you’re coming home. Don’t be afraid to tell him about your mother and about Sammy. He’ll admire you for that stuff. For getting past it.”

“Okay,” Macy said, biting her lip. “You really think so?” She took out her phone and checked her text messages.

“He’s still at work,” she said, grinning like a kid. “He’s not even worrying.” She texted Neil and showed Ray:
B home soon, w fab dinner. Love u so
.

A big man came out of the kitchen and laid their food in front of them. He nodded toward the game on TV.

“That game’s over,” he said. “You know what Archie Griffin said, ‘Ain’t the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.’ These guys got no fight.”

“Hell of a player, Griffin. Two Heismans.”

The man paused, like he might sit down, and Macy moved over to make room.

“Great tailback,” the man said.

“Well, they measure these things differently now,” Ray said. “For my money, Bronko Nagurski was the greatest running back.”

“Ah,” the man said. “Played both sides of the ball. You don’t see that anymore.”

“No you don’t,” Ray said.

The man slipped the bill under Ray’s plate. “Come back soon.”

“Ray,” Macy said. “If you want to be with Randeane, if you need, I don’t know, support, I’ll be there for you. Neil, too.”

Ray picked at the fries, which were the best fries he could remember eating. If he did nothing else to improve his life, he could come to Buck’s every few weeks, have a beer and a plate of sweet-potato fries, and talk football with the cook.

Macy tapped the back of his hand with her fork. “Ray. You be the quarterback and I’ll be, I’ll be the guy who protects the quarterback. I’ll be that guy.”

“Honey,” Ray said. “There’s really no one like that in football.”

Right after Jennifer was born, they found cyst after cyst inside of Ellie, and when Jennifer was two, Ellie had a hysterectomy. Ray brought her an armful of red stargazer lilies from the florist, not from the grocery store or the hospital gift shop, because Ellie was particular about things like that, and when he walked in, she smiled, closed her compact, and set her lipstick on the bedside table. She’d brought her blue silk bathrobe from home and had brushed her hair back in a ponytail and tied it with a blue ribbon. She made room for Ray on the bed and they held hands.