He reared his head back, curled his lower lip, and mimicked her gesture. “I’m just asking a question. People put their trust in you.” He tapped a single finger off her shoulder. “I know, I know, I know, you think I’m drunk and maybe, you know, maybe I am. But what I’m saying is important. I’m a fun guy, I’m a nice guy, my friends think I’m hilarious. I got three sisters. Thing is, point is here, that you think like it’s okay to start throwing back the sauce on the job because you probably got a net to land in if it backfires. Am I right? Some doctor or venture capitalist hubby who . . .” He lost the thought, then caught it again, splayed his pink fingers against the base of his pink throat. “I can’t do that. I gotta go make the money. I bet you got some sugar daddy pays for your Pilates and your Lex and the lunches where you hang with your homegirls and shit all over everything he does for you. Have that drink, bitch. Somebody bought it for you. Show some respect.”
He wavered in front of her. She wondered what she’d do if he touched her shoulder again. Nobody was moving in the bar. No one was saying anything. No one was trying to help. They were all just watching the show.
“I’d like to go,” she repeated and took a step toward the door.
He put that single finger on her shoulder again. “One more minute. Have a drink with me. With us.” He waved at the bar. “Don’t make us feel like you think bad of me. You don’t think bad of me, right? I’m just a guy in the street. I’m just a regular dude. I’m just—”
“Rachel!” Brian Delacroix materialized by Lander’s left shoulder, slid past his hip, and was suddenly standing beside her. “I’m so sorry. I got hung up.” He gave Lander a distant smile before turning back to her. “Look, we’re late, I’m sorry. Doors were at eight. We gotta go.” He took her vodka off the bar and downed it in one easy swallow.
Brian wore a navy blue suit, white shirt with the top button undone, black tie loosened and slightly askew. He remained quite handsome but not in the way that made you think he’d hold up the bathroom every morning. His look was more rugged, his face just on the right side of craggy, his smile a bit crooked, his wavy black hair not fully tamed. Weathered skin, crow’s-feet around the eyes, strong chin and nose. His blue eyes were open and amused, as if he were perpetually surprised to find himself in situations such as these.
“You look spectacular, by the way,” he said. “Again, sorry I got held up. No excuse.”
“Whoa, whoa.” Lander squinted at his own drink for a moment. “Okay?”
This could easily be a scam perpetuated by the both of them. Lander played the wolf, she was the unwitting sheep, and the part of the shepherd was played by Brian Delacroix. She hadn’t forgotten that weird vibe he’d given off that day at the Athenaeum and found their just happening to find each other on the day of her divorce a bit too coincidental.
She decided not to play along. She held up her hands. “Guys, I think I’m just gonna—”
But Lander didn’t hear her because he pushed Brian. “Yo, bro, you need to step off.”
Brian gave her an amused cock of the eyebrow when Lander called him “bro.” She had to work at it to keep her own smile from breaking out.
He turned to Lander. “Dude, I would, but I can’t. I know, I know, you’re disappointed, but, hey, you didn’t know she was waiting on me. You’re a fun guy, though, I can tell. And the night’s young.” He indicated the bartender. “Tom knows me. Right, Tom?”
Tom said, “I do indeed.”
“So—what’s your name?”
“Lander.”
“Cool name.”
“Thanks.”
“Honey,” he said to Rachel, “why don’t you pull the car around?”
Rachel heard herself say, “Sure.”
“Lander,” he said, but he met Rachel’s eyes and flicked his own toward the door, “your money’s no good here tonight. Whatever you imbibe, Tom will put it on my tab.” He flicked his eyes at her again, a little bit more insistently, and this time she moved. “You want to buy a round for those girls over there by the pool table? That’s on me too. The one in the green flannel and the black jeans has been looking at you since I came through the door . . .”
She made the door and didn’t glance back, though she wanted to. But the last look she’d caught on Lander’s face was of a dog waiting, head cocked, for either a treat or a command. In under a minute, Brian Delacroix had taken ownership of him.
She couldn’t find her car. She walked block after block. She cut east, then west, turned north, retraced her steps south. Somewhere in this collection of wrought-iron fences and railings and chocolate or redbrick townhouses was a light gray 2010 Prius.
It was Brian’s voice, she decided as she headed up a side street toward the lights of Copley Square. It was warm, confident, and smooth, but not huckster-smooth. It was the voice of a friend you’d been hoping to meet your whole life or a caring uncle who’d left your life too soon but had now returned. It was the voice of home, but not home the reality, home as a construct, home as an ideal.
A few minutes later, that voice entered the air behind her: “I won’t take it personally if you think I’m a stalker and pick up your pace. I won’t. I’ll stay planted to this spot and never see you again.”
She stopped. Turned. Saw him standing back at the mouth of the alley she’d crossed thirty seconds before. He stood under the streetlight with his hands clasped in front of him, and he didn’t move. He’d added a raincoat over the suit.
“But if you’re open to a little more of the evening, I’ll stay ten paces back and follow you wherever you’ll let me buy you a drink.”
She looked at him for a long time, long enough for her to notice that the sparrow had stopped flapping in her chest and the base of her throat had come unblocked. She felt as calm as she’d felt since she was last safe behind closed doors in her own home.
“Make it five paces,” she said.
10
LIGHTS UP
They walked through the South End, and soon she realized why he wore the raincoat. There was a mist in the air so thin she didn’t notice it until her hair was damp and her forehead was wet. She raised her hood above her head, but of course it was damp now too.
“Did you send over the vodka?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Honestly?”
“No, inauthentically.”
He chuckled. “Because I had to use the bathroom and I wanted to make sure you’d still be there when I got out.”
“Why not just walk up to me?”
“Nerves. It’s not like you’ve seemed elated the times I’ve initiated contact over the years.”
She slowed then and he caught up.
“I did like getting your e-mails,” she said.
“Odd. You didn’t respond like it.”
“It’s been a complicated decade for me.” She gave him a smile that felt hesitant but hopeful.
He removed his raincoat and draped it over her shoulders.
“I’m not taking your coat,” she said.
“I know you’re not. I’m lending it to you.”
“I don’t need it.”
He stepped back, got a look at her. “Fine. Give it back.”
She smiled, rolled her eyes. “Well, if you insist.”
They walked on, their footsteps the only sound for a full block.
“Where are you taking us?” he said.
“I was hoping the RR still exists.”
“It does. One block up, two over.”
She nodded. “Why do they call it that? There are no tracks near it.”
“The underground railroad. They used to run most of the slaves out through that block. This building here”—he pointed at a redbrick mansion tucked between a row house and what had once been a church—“was where Edgar Ross set up the first black-run printing press in the early 1800s.”
She shot him a sidelong glance. “Aren’t we a font?”
“I like history.” He gave her a shrug
that was somehow cute on a big man.
“Left here.”
They turned left. The street was older and quieter. A lot of the garages or garage apartments had been livery stables at one time. The windows were thick and leaded. The trees looked as old as the Constitution.
“I liked your hard news stories better than the soft ones, by the way.”
She chuckled. “You didn’t feel sufficiently informed when I did that story on the cat that barked?”
He snapped his fingers. “Promise me it’s archived.”
They heard a metallic pop and the street turned black. Every light—in the houses, in the streetlamps, in the small office building at the end of the street—snapped off.
They could see each other, if barely, in the pewter gloaming cast by the tall buildings that fringed the neighborhood, but this near-dark was alien and carried with it the arrival of the postponable truth that all urban dwellers kept tucked on high shelves—we are unprepared for most forms of survival. At least those that don’t come with amenities.
They continued up the street with a bit of wonder. The hairs on her skin were alive in a way they hadn’t been five minutes ago. Her hearing was sharper. All her pores were wide open. Her scalp was cold, damp, adrenalized.
Haiti had felt like this. Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, Jacmel. In some neighborhoods they were still waiting for the lights to come back on.
A woman stepped out of a building on the corner. She held a candle in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and as she swept the flashlight across their torsos, Rachel made out the sign above her head and realized they were at the RR bar.
“Oh, hey!” The woman waved the flashlight up and down and the light anointed them before rejoining their bodies at the knees. “What’re you two doing out in this?”
“Looking for her car,” he said. “Then we just decided to look for your bar, then this happened.”
He raised his hands to the dark, and there was another metallic groan, and the lights came back on.
They blinked into the soft shafts of neon cast by the beer sign in the window and the bar sign above the door.
“Nice trick,” the bartender said. “You do birthday parties?”
She opened the door for them and they went inside. It was as Rachel remembered, maybe even better, the lights a little lower, the smell of old beer soaked into black rubber replaced with the faintest hint of hickory. Tom Waits on the jukebox when they came through the door, fading as they ordered their drinks, and replaced by Radiohead from the Pablo Honey era. Tom Waits she could place in his proper context because most of his best music pre-dated her. But it was often a shock, however predictable, however mild, to realize there were people legally drinking in bars who’d been in diapers when Radiohead was part of her college-years soundtrack. We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we’re the last to know.
There was no one else in the bar but them and Gail, the bartender.
Halfway through their first drinks, Rachel said to Brian, “Tell me about the last time I saw you.”
His eyes narrowed in confusion.
“You were with an antiquities dealer.”
He snapped his fingers. “Jack Ahern, right? Was that Jack?”
“It was.”
“We were heading to lunch, ran into you up at the top of Beacon Hill.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, “those are the facts. But I’m after the vibe. You were off that day, m’ man, couldn’t get rid of me quick enough.”
He was nodding. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
“You admit it?”
“Hell, yeah.” He turned on his seat, choosing his words. “Jack was an investor in a small subsidiary I was creating at the time. Nothing big, just a company that makes high-end wood floors and shutters. Jack’s also a self-appointed moralist, very fifteenth century in that regard, Lutheran fundamentalist or Calvinist fundamentalist, I can’t remember which.”
“I get them confused too.”
He shot her a wry grin. “Anyway, I was married then.”
She took a long pull on her drink. “Married?”
“Yeah. Heading for divorce but married in that moment. And I’m a salesman, I was selling that marriage to my moralistic client.”
“I’m with you so far.”
“Then I see you crossing the street toward me and I know if I don’t get ahead of it, he’s gonna see it, so I got all hyper like I do when I’m really nervous and I bungled the whole fucking thing.”
“You said ‘get ahead of it.’ What’s ‘it’?”
He cocked his head and then his eyebrow at her. “Do I really have to say the words?”
“It’s your explanation, my friend.”
“‘It’ would be my attraction to you, Rachel. My ex used to get on me about it—‘Are you watching your girlfriend on the news again?’ My friends could see it. I’m damn sure Jack Ahern would have picked up on it if my tongue was hanging out in the middle of Beacon Street. I mean, Jesus, ever since Chicopee. Come on.”
“You come on. I didn’t know about this.”
“Oh, well, yeah. I guess, why would you?”
“You could’ve mentioned it.”
“In an e-mail? That you’d be reading with that picture-perfect husband of yours?”
“He was anything but.”
“I didn’t know that at the time. Plus, I was married.”
“What happened to her?”
“She left. Went back to Canada.”
“So we’re both divorced.”
He nodded and raised his glass. “To that.”
She clinked his glass, drained her own, and they ordered two more.
She said, “Tell me something you don’t like about yourself.”
“I don’t like? I thought the point was to show off your best self in the early going.”
“The early going of what?”
“Meeting someone.”
“Dating? Are we calling this a date?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way yet.”
“You’ve got your drink, I’ve got mine, we’re turned toward each other, trying to ascertain if we enjoy each other’s company enough to do it again.”
“That does sound like a date.” He held up a finger. “Unless it’s like an NFL preseason game to a date.”
“MLB spring training to a date,” she said. “Wait, what do they call the preseason in the NBA?”
“The preseason.”
“I know, but what do they call it?”
“That’s what they call it.”
“You sure? Seems unoriginal.”
“And yet there it is.”
“And how about the NHL?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“But you’re Canadian.”
“Yes,” he admitted, “but I’m not very good at it.”
They both laughed for no other reason but that her mother’s first stage—the spark—had been reached. Somewhere from the walk along cobblestones on a block so quiet the only sounds were the echoes of their footsteps to the smell of his damp raincoat collar under her chin to the two-minute blackout to the birthing of them as a duo as they crossed the threshold into the bar and Tom Waits growled softly through a fading chorus to right now, bantering over a vodka and a scotch respectively, they’d crossed a second threshold—leaving behind who they’d been before their attraction had been certified mutual and moving forward with that attraction taken as a given.
“What don’t I like about myself ?”
She nodded.
He lifted his drink and rattled the cubes softly from one side of the glass to the other. The playfulness left his face and was replaced by something sad and bewildered though not bitter. She liked that lack of bitterness immediately. She’d grown up in a house of bitterness and then, when she was sure it would never touch her again, she married it. She’d had her fill.
Brian said, “You know when you’re a kid and you don’t get picked for the team, or someone you lik
e doesn’t like you back, or your parents reject or marginalize you not because of something you did but because they were fucked up and toxic?”
“Yes and yes and yes. I can’t wait to see where you’re going with this.”
Now he took a drink. “I think of those times—and there are lots of them in a childhood; they accrue—and I realize that I always believed to my core that they were right. I wasn’t worthy of the team, I wasn’t fit to be liked back, my family rejected me because I deserved to be rejected.” He put his glass on the bar. “What I don’t like about myself is that sometimes I don’t really like myself.”
“And no matter how much good you do,” she said, “no matter how great a friend you are, how great a wife or husband, how great a humanitarian, nothing, I mean, nothing—”
“Nothing,” he said.
“—will ever make up for what a piece of shit you really are.”
He gave her a broad and beautiful smile. “I see you’ve spent time in my head.”
“Ha.” She shook her head. “Just mine.”
They said nothing for a minute. They finished their drinks, ordered two more.
“And yet,” she said, “you project confidence amazingly well. You handled that d-bag in the bar like you were his hypnotist.”
“He was an idiot. Idiots are easy to outwit. That’s why they’re idiots.”
“How do I know you weren’t in on it together?”
“In on what?”
“You know,” she said, “he makes me feel scared, you come to my rescue.”
“But I got you out of there and I stayed behind.”
“If he was in on it with you, you could have been out that door five seconds after me and followed me.”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. He nodded. “That’s a good point. Are you often approached this elaborately?”
“Not that I know of.”
“It would take an awful lot of work on my part. Wasn’t that guy with a girlfriend at one point? They were fighting?”
She nodded.
“So I would have had to—let me order this correctly—known you were coming to the bar tonight, hired a friend to pretend he was there with a girlfriend, start a fight with her, get her to leave, then approach you and be belligerent, all so I could step in and buy you the time you needed to leave so I could then—”