When the cops brought Noonan home and said he’d been in a fight, the first thing his father wanted to know was who started it. Noonan told him the truth, that he and Jerzy had thrown punches more or less simultaneously, and one of the policemen confirmed that this was what had happened.
“That Quinn boy’s two years older than my son,” Noonan’s father reminded them.
That might be true, they conceded, but the fight had been so savage that they’d had to take the Quinn kid to the hospital.
“How come you didn’t take my son to the hospital, too?” He’d noticed what the cops hadn’t, that his hand flopped limply at the end of his broken wrist.
“Your boy won. He don’t need no hospital.”
His father grabbed Noonan’s forearm roughly and held it up for their inspection. “A broken wrist doesn’t qualify?”
That was the last thing Noonan remembered. He woke up in the hospital alone, with a lump on his forehead and his wrist in a cast. He didn’t see either of his parents until they came the next day to take him home. In the car, his father announced that in the fall he’d be attending military school, where he might learn self-discipline. Somewhere his father had heard the fight had been about his second cousin. “What’d you do with her?” he said. Noonan, realizing that he was far angrier about this than about the fight itself, didn’t want to answer. His mother was in the car, and he wasn’t about to explain about the strip poker with her and his little brothers all piled into the backseat. “Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing,” his father repeated, nodding at the road ahead, his birthmark pulsing. After a moment he said, “Do you have any idea why God made women? Answer me.”
He had no idea what his father was getting at, so he said no, he didn’t.
“Then I’ll tell you. God made women so we’d know how to go about ruining our lives. You don’t believe it, just look at me.”
But Noonan refused to. He, too, stared out through the windshield at the road.
“You got something to say, D.C.?” He adjusted the rearview mirror so he could watch her response. “You want to correct me, maybe? You got a different view you’d like to express?”
Noonan turned to look at his mother, and her eyes were full as she shook her head.
His father nodded in disgust. “Look at her,” he told Noonan. “Take a good look. You want to end up saddled with something like that? That’s your idea of a future?”
He looked down at the cast on his wrist, wishing it were bigger, heavier, and that he could bring it down on his father’s head like a club. He wouldn’t have cared if his father wrecked the car as a result. If they all died, even his little brothers, that would’ve been just fine with him.
“I didn’t think so,” his father concluded.
The last thing Noonan had wanted was to attend military school, but he’d gone willingly enough. The fight with Jerzy Quinn, the fact that he’d become that other person, had frightened him. How was it possible, he wondered, for a person to simply vacate his own body like that and then return to it afterward? Even scarier was his sense that such an ability might be a gift, one he’d have need of again in this life, perhaps often. To look at his father was to be reminded that the fight had exhausted neither his contempt nor his rage. Maybe being sent away from home would be for the best.
And there was another reason. If he went away, he wouldn’t have to look—knowing what he knew about the West End woman—at his mother. Because when he’d turned around and looked at her in the backseat, though he didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, he’d seen what his father meant.
NOONAN HEARD LICHTNER stirring around upstairs and hoped he wouldn’t find an excuse to come down. Evangeline’s scent, along with the stale odor of their sex, was still in the room. Only then did it occur to Noonan that perhaps it was a foolish thing to have left him alone in the studio with his canvases. How would he feel if he went up in the morning and found his guest gone, his paintings slashed, his New York show up in smoke? Would he feel at all? Tonight, watching Lichtner ricochet among his myriad emotions—rage, indignation, pity, affection, confusion—had been exhausting, but he’d been envious, too. That he himself had felt so little physical pleasure with the other man’s wife didn’t trouble him as much as that he felt even less emotionally.
Rising, he went barefoot to the base of the stairs to listen. For what, the sound of canvases being ripped to shreds? The muffled sound of weeping? But it was quiet above, suggesting that Lichtner had either fallen asleep or, more likely, was lying awake in the dark, brooding on the mystery of his marriage. Why he wasn’t able to fill Evangeline’s life to the brim, as he’d once surely hoped to. If he was honest, he was also contemplating why she no longer was sufficient to his own happiness. How had they managed to disappoint each other so? Was his decision to give up writing novels, something he apparently wasn’t very good at, to do travel articles, at which he’d succeeded, the beginning of their troubles? Had she seen that as cowardice, a premature admission of defeat? And what of Evangeline herself? How had she disappointed him? By not being as beautiful as when they’d married? Was he that shallow? Or was it that she no longer needed him, that her passion now was her struggling gallery? If she could make a success of it, she’d be free of him. Was that what she was working toward so purposefully? Or had something else poisoned their affection, the miasma of Venice itself, too many summers spent breathing in toxic vapors from the canals? Blame, yet again, the water? Noonan found himself wondering what they’d been like as kids, and if what ailed adults could be traced back that far. Lucy, at least to judge from his letters, was the same as the boy he’d been, only more so, and Jerzy Quinn’s drifting across that median had the feel of inevitability, the only surprise being that it had taken so long.
After their epic battle Noonan’s path had crossed meaningfully with Jerzy’s only once, during his senior year in high school. One of his part-time jobs that fall was as Sunday night bartender—the legal drinking age had been eighteen back then—at a West End dive called Murdick’s. He’d just given last call when Jerzy sauntered in, his hair slicked wetly back in the same ducktail he’d worn in junior high. He’d dropped out years earlier, as soon as he legally could, and had been working nonunion construction jobs. Noonan occasionally caught sight of him on Division Street, filthy when he got off work, and they usually exchanged cautious hellos. Now he punched in an old Frankie Valli song on the jukebox and slid onto a barstool so gracefully that Noonan suspected it might become his defining adult gesture. He waited a beat before coming down the bar, not long enough to provoke his old adversary, but not exactly jumping to attention either. “How you been, Jerz?” he’d asked, keeping his voice neutral, neither friendly nor hostile, making it clear things could go whatever way the other boy wanted, though neither was exactly a boy anymore.
Jerzy said nothing for a moment, and in that brief silence there’d been an eloquent admission of just how little remained of what had been between them a few short years ago, of who they’d been but weren’t anymore. “I’m still here,” he said finally, and Noonan drew him the draft beer he asked for, along with a shot of cheap rye whiskey on the side. “How’s life in the Borough?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Noonan said. A few weeks earlier he’d moved out of his father’s house and was now living downtown, above the Rexall drugstore on Hudson Street. Dec Lynch, who knew everybody, had arranged with the owner that Noonan could squat there rent-free provided he didn’t smoke in the building or have parties or allow vagrants inside. There was neither kitchen nor bathroom, which meant he had to shower at the Y, and he slept on the floor in a sleeping bag.
“Your old man cool with that?”
“I’m doing it. What he’s cool with doesn’t come into it.”
Jerzy nodded, then took a drag off his cigarette. “Seen a couple of your games. Almost made me wish I didn’t drop out. You could’ve used me.”
Noonan said, yeah, they probably could, but for the life of h
im couldn’t imagine it. “You’d have had to give those up,” he said, indicating the cigarette.
“Fuck that, then,” Jerzy said. “So, will you be graduating?”
Noonan admitted he probably would, and wondered if there was a note of wistfulness in this question.
Jerzy downed his shot of whiskey with one gulp. “Then what?”
He decided to be vague. College, maybe, if he got a scholarship. If not, probably enlist, though that would mean Vietnam.
“I tried to enlist,” Jerzy said, “but I failed the physical.”
He knew he wouldn’t, though, and Jerzy seemed to know it, too. He gave Noonan one of his nastier grins. “You’re with Nan Beverly now,” he said. Not asking him, telling, just in case he tried to deny it. “What’s she like?”
“She’s a nice girl,” Noonan said, no intention of saying anything more. The other boy pushed his beer glass forward for a refill. Noonan thought about saying no. It was past closing, but he poured him another shot of rotgut and refilled his beer. So far Jerzy had made no move toward his wallet.
“I’m married now,” he said. “You probably knew that.”
Noonan said no, he hadn’t heard.
“She’s a whore,” Jerzy said, matter of fact, then told him her maiden name, which rang a vague bell, but he couldn’t summon a face to go with it. “She’s fucking somebody else for sure. Like I care,” he added.
Noonan didn’t know what to say to that.
“We got a little girl, though.” Perhaps this was something he did care about. “They still talk about us, you know,” he said, smiling now. “That fight we had? You hadn’t got that first punch in, it would’ve been different.”
“I don’t remember much about it,” Noonan told him, the absolute truth.
“Would’ve been different,” Jerzy repeated, and for a moment Noonan wondered if he might be considering renewed hostilities. “It definitely would’ve been different. But you know what? It wouldn’t have changed anything. You’d be right where you are, and I’d be right where I am. The shit that matters, you’ve got no say in.”
“You could be right.”
“Fuck that, I am right.” And he downed his second whiskey by way of punctuation.
“Okay,” Noonan said, “but I’m going to have to close up when you finish your beer.”
Jerzy nodded, conceding this and every other lousy necessity in a world full of them. “Thanks for staying open. It’s my birthday.”
“I didn’t know that,” Noonan admitted, wishing him a happy one.
“Thing is, we never should have fought, you and me,” he said, then drained his beer. He still didn’t reach for his wallet, and Noonan guessed he wouldn’t. It was, after all, his birthday. “I never wanted to, really.”
“Me neither,” Noonan said.
“Hell,” Jerzy said, sliding off his stool. “I knew that. Tell me something, though. You ever see Karen anymore?”
His second cousin, the one he’d beaten at strip poker. Noonan told him no, that he’d seen her a couple of times on the street and said hello, but that was it.
“I should hope,” Jerzy said. “She’s three hundred pounds if she’s an ounce. We’d have to find somebody else to fight over if we ever decided to go at it again.”
Noonan told him he didn’t see that happening, and Jerzy said no, he didn’t either, and they shook hands on it, Jerzy’s grip feeling strong in his bad wrist. When the door closed behind him, Noonan locked it, and he never saw Jerzy again. How long, he couldn’t help wondering, had Jerzy been dead inside before he finally allowed himself to drift across that median? Thinking back on that night at Murdick’s, Noonan could see that he’d already been a fatalist, convinced there wasn’t a thing you could do about “the shit that matters.” At twenty, the futility of the struggle had come home to him powerfully. The girl you were fighting over would weigh three hundred pounds in two or three years, so what was the point? Which left the long second act during which nothing changed. Like so many second acts, Jerzy’s seemed unnecessary, especially once you knew the first and third. Sometimes you didn’t even need to know the third. Face it, Noonan’s own second act was dragging a bit. Assuming he was still in it and hadn’t drifted, unaware, into his third. His listless affair with Evangeline Lichtner certainly felt like second-act stasis. Was it possible, he wondered sleepily, there’d been more to Jerzy’s second act than he knew? Maybe the daughter he’d seemed fond of had unexpectedly given him a link to a future he hadn’t been able to imagine that night in Murdick’s. Fatalism was difficult to maintain in the presence of a child, so maybe. He hoped so, and he hoped it had been an accident and not that Jerzy steered deliberately into third-act resolution.
Noonan stuffed the obituary and photos and note back into the envelope, wondering again how it had come to be addressed by Sarah when its contents were pure Lucy. A tiny mystery in the context of the larger one he still thought about from time to time—speaking of long, tedious second acts—what Sarah’s life must’ve been like married for over thirty years to such a conventional, cautious man. Sarah, whose spirit at eighteen had yearned, every bit as much as his own, for adventure. Her mother had been a bit of a free spirit, Noonan recalled, and Sarah had admired that wildness, maybe even imagining she was the same way herself, deep down. But in the end she’d opted for stability and reassurance. And who knew? Maybe she was happy. Some people managed to be, despite all manner of ill fortune, just as a great many of the world’s fortunates somehow contrived to be miserable. A sensible person, Sarah had probably made her peace early on. Even as a girl she’d been determined to take responsibility for the hand she’d been dealt, despite not having cut the cards, and the dealer a known cheat. Determined, also, to make the best of things, to see the glass as half full when it was three-quarters empty.
Had she married him instead of Lucy, a different sort of peace would have been required, one that would have ensured an even greater misery. True, she’d have been miserable in more interesting places than Thomaston, New York, and she’d have had more of the company that misery is said to love. She probably would’ve gotten on well with his ex-wives, who still got together every year without fail, like survivors, to wonder what there’d been about him that had attracted them, or any woman. “You’re incapable of love,” his second wife had once told him. She’d actually said this shortly after they’d finished making love, pretty damned successfully, as Noonan recalled, so the remark, not to mention its timing, had surprised him. Would Sarah have arrived at the same conclusion and said the same thing? It was possible, maybe even probable. One thing was for certain. He’d have minded it more, coming from her. On the other hand, maybe she’d have been just what he needed. Maybe she’d have been good for him. Noonan considered this possibility for about two seconds, then dismissed it. The best he had in him came out only as paint on canvas. To imagine a different life was to imagine a different self with which to live it.
Beside the point, in any case. Art, he’d come to believe, was little more than the principle of one thing leading to another, whereas love, insofar as he understood it, depended on a thing remaining forever what it was, which in Noonan’s experience it militantly refused to do. What people called love was the perfect recipe for disappointment and recrimination at the benign end of the emotional spectrum, homicide at the malignant end. Like all the other women who’d had the misfortune to swim into his orbit, Sarah would have learned, when he finally betrayed her—when all was said and done, he was his father’s son—to find comfort and solace in other men, much as Evangeline had done when she took stock of her marriage and life.
She’d avoided all that by marrying Lucy. Which meant that at least she wouldn’t have to worry about things changing. With Lucy, one thing didn’t lead to another. He would remain Lucy—steadfast, slow of movement, wit and tongue (precisely where Noonan was quick) and, yes, unfailingly kind. Dull virtues, all, but not nothing, especially to someone as deeply conflicted as Sarah. And what of Lucy’
s own drama? By the time Noonan had left Thomaston, Lucy, like Jerzy Quinn, had seemed to have arrived at resolution. In Sarah, he seemed to have more than he’d dared to hope for, and his second act was as difficult to imagine as Jerzy’s. What was at stake? Where was the suspense?
Yawning, Noonan put the envelope back on the nightstand and turned out the light. A moment later he turned it back on again, aware that he’d solved one minor mystery. The envelope had been addressed in Sarah’s hand because, at some point, it had contained a letter from her. It was powder blue, for one thing, and distinctly feminine for another, utterly unlike the sturdy business envelopes Lucy always sent his clipped photos and newsprint in. Had he steamed the letter open, read it, then replaced it with contents more to his liking? Speaking of unknowable second acts.
When Noonan turned off the lamp this time, he left it off, and fell asleep smiling.
LOVE
WHAT HAPPENS when the victor unexpectedly quits the field? Had Bobby Marconi not been sent to military school, there can be little doubt he would’ve ruled Thomaston junior high. But his sudden, inexplicable retreat created a vacuum, and the boy who filled it was Jerzy Quinn himself. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d been vanquished. Bobby’s disappearance had the effect of first undermining, then mitigating and finally expunging his great triumph from the public record. It was a gradual process, of course, an evolution, but by the start of eighth grade, a year after their battle, Jerzy Quinn had carried the day, and Bobby’s reputation lay in tatters.
Kids still remembered the fight, of course, and talked about it. Not even West Enders denied that Bobby had won, but there his disappearance was perceived as cowardice. No one said this so openly, at least not while there was a chance he might return, but there were whispers, and no one to contradict them. It didn’t seem to matter that Bobby’s father had banished him. His absence was all anyone needed to know. Yeah, sure, he’d won the fight, but Jerzy had never said uncle, never given in or admitted defeat. Even as he’d lain on his back on the sidewalk, face bloodied and eyes glazed over, his wolfish grin proclaimed, it was decided, that nothing had been settled. Round one had gone to Bobby Marconi, but so what? Next Friday night after the dance, or when the Bijou matinee let out on Saturday afternoon, Jerzy would have met him again, and this time, well, he could be taken by surprise once, but not twice. Some witnesses belatedly recalled he’d warned that, when Bobby was pulled off him, it wasn’t over between them, which explained why Mr. Marconi had sent him away. Probably Bobby had asked his old man to do it. Besides, he hadn’t come home the next summer and over Christmas had remained holed up in his parents’ house. Why? Because he knew what would happen if he showed his face on the street.