The prisoner, stripped of suit and tie and looking old beyond his years, did not speak. For the longest time R.H. simply remained silent behind the wire-reinforced glass that separated them. He wore an orange jumpsuit with short sleeves. Tim saw the hair on his arms, prominent swirls of gray hair that had been covered over by bespoke suits for all the years he had known him. This small laying-bare pierced his heart. Another noticeable change had taken hold of the hair on R.H.’s head. The dye had washed out, leaving the hair a dull gray. It wavered thin and airy like a loose clump of field pollen. With a regal reluctance R.H. picked up the phone. He held it to his ear and stared at Tim with a kind of catatonic intent, sitting forward and saying nothing. Tim began to speak. Trying to interpret how his words were being received, he was not encouraged. Was R.H. angry at him past reclamation, or was he simply traumatized by his circumstances beyond the niceties of human interaction? He found he had no choice but to put the question out of mind and persevere, knowing that such perseverance was itself a kind of penance.
He admitted that Jane was not ill and never had been. He had lied about her sickness to cover up his own. He had fallen ill just prior to the trial, and the instinct that came naturally to him as a man too proud for his own good was to cover it up. Cover up all hint of weakness, cover it up or he was finished. Essentially, though it was not the first time he had struggled with this particular illness, he was scared out of his wits: scared of failing R.H. at a dire moment, yes, but most of all, scared of losing control over his professional life. Scared for himself first, R.H. second. It was important for him to admit that now.
“I had an option,” he said, as R.H. bore two clean holes through the glass with his silent and inscrutable stare, holes that at any moment might begin to smoke. “I could have recused myself from the start and thrown all my efforts into helping Mike Kronish take over the case. Would that have gotten you an acquittal? I don’t know. Could I have gotten you an acquittal if I had stayed healthy? There was a time when I thought I knew the answer to that. But the truth is, I don’t know. I have learned to have less conviction.”
He believed that R.H. was innocent of killing his wife, but the man on the other side of the glass, almost waxlike in his stillness, staring at him with cold, flinty eyes, that man seemed capable of killing.
“You had him,” he said.
“What?”
R.H.’s head did not move. “You had him.”
“Had who?”
“The man who killed Evelyn,” he said. “You had him.”
“Are you talking about the man with the knife?”
“You had him.”
“Do we really know,” he said, “can we say with absolute certainty that that man is the one who killed her?”
“You had him and you let him go. He was right there in front of you and you let him go.”
“At the time, R.H., I didn’t know—”
“The one guy who could have exonerated me,” he said. “You let him walk away.”
“I think maybe you’re putting too much faith in—”
“You should have grabbed him,” he interrupted with a rising voice. “Why didn’t you grab the son of a bitch? He’s the only one who knows who did it. He did it! And you let him slip through your goddamn fingers! Why couldn’t you grab him?”
R.H. didn’t seem to give a damn for his confession of lies and failures. He blamed Tim for one thing and one thing only. Now it was like an obsession that he had been waiting years to unleash. Tim could hear him just as well through the glass as through the phone.
“Answer me!”
“I think you might be overplaying that man’s role. No one knows for certain that he killed her.”
“He had the murder weapon.”
“It may have been the murder weapon.”
“May have been? May have been?”
His loud voice attracted the attention of the guard standing against the wall. “How could you let him go? How could you walk away? He was my one hope! And you let him go!” He stood up. He screamed into the phone, “You let him go!” He began to beat the glass with the phone. “You let him go!” The guard rushed over. Thump! “You let him go!” Thump thump! The guard grabbed him from behind and lifted him into the air. The chair went flying as the old man kicked out his legs. One of the kicks landed on the glass. He hung on to the phone as long as he could, until the cord snapped and he and the guard went sailing. “You had him!” he cried through the partition. He threw the phone at the glass as the guard dragged him out of the room. His cries grew more muffled. “You had him! You had him! You had him! You had him!”
12
When did she go from someone who liked a glass of wine with dinner to the woman with the lights blazing at four a.m.? Trying to do the bills totally blasted. Her nice quiet life had been stalked from behind by alcohol. Who would have guessed? If you were predisposed, or had the gene, or lacked some inner resource, you had to be vigilant or you went down. Four in the morning and she was digging through her purse for a Newport. What was that? She was not that woman. But she was. Oldest story there is, total cliché. Except when it’s your life. When it’s your life it’s not a cliché, it’s real life, real everyday life, just drunk. It came up from behind her and knocked her to her knees. She never expected it, but that’s what happened, it came up from behind. Being a drunk was simple. It was an accident you caught sight of in the rearview mirror, and the car you saw was your own. The intersection where the accident happened, it was the very one you were approaching. When you turned from the mirror to the road in front of you—BAM! you got hit again. And then, once again, you were looking back at it. She was supposed to be on guard her whole life against alcohol? Who knew.
But it wasn’t an accident. She was making choices, even if she didn’t know it.
She called Becka during his time in the room and said, “You have to come home now and watch your father. It’s your turn, it’s time.” Like he was a baby and not her husband. Like Becka had made the vows and not her. Becka didn’t understand. “Why, do you have plans?” She had no plans. She hadn’t had plans for months. She hadn’t seen a movie, she hadn’t talked to friends, she hadn’t been to the dentist. She wasn’t going outside to collect the mail. Becka got the mail when she came home. Becka was the one who had to drag her by the hair to see Dr. Bagdasarian. Jane kept thinking, when did she become the parent? Becka told her to put the wine down and get in the car. She had called from school to make the appointment. The doctor took one look at Jane and said she was in the dictionary under depressed and wrote her a prescription. She didn’t need a prescription, she needed a life. She needed to start over again with new teeth and fresh underwear. But of course she took the prescription. If it came from a pharmacy and modified behavior, there had to be some merit to it.
But a month went by and she was still calling Becka. “You have to come home. I have to drive.” And Becka said, “Drive?” “Yes, drive.” “Drive where?” Drive where—what sort of question was that? When you’re driving just to drive you don’t know where. You’re just driving. She shrieked that into the phone. If she shrieked, if she called late at night, if she cried, if she made several calls in the same hour, Becka came home and she was able to drive. In the magazines and the newspapers, those people, they had such inner resources. Meeting adversity head-on and all that.
Her first time driving, she made it to Stamford, Connecticut. That wasn’t even an hour away. She thought she’d stop at the Bennigan’s for lunch and then she’d keep driving north. She walked in around lunchtime and the tables in the dining room were full so she took a seat at the bar. She was just going to fuel up before hitting the road again. But she got drunk instead. She was at the bar throughout the day. The daytime bartender switched with the nighttime bartender and she was still there. She finally asked the nighttime bartender to call her a cab. She was drunk and tired and didn’t want to have to walk out to the parking lot. She thought there might be some way to convince someone t
o carry her. But when the cabbie showed up and the bartender said, “Your cab’s here,” she got off the barstool and grabbed her purse and walked out on her own. She got inside the cab and didn’t know what to say. “How about a hotel?” she finally said. The cabbie drove her to a Holiday Inn and helped her inside. He helped her check in and then he helped her to her room. She woke up around noon not knowing where she was. She woke up, she knew it was a hotel room, but she didn’t know in what city. She walked down to the Denny’s for some coffee and when the coffee started to take effect she remembered the Bennigan’s. She went back to the Holiday Inn and asked for a cab. It was the same cabbie from the night before. She didn’t remember him. He said to her, “Back to the Bennigan’s?” She asked if he ever took a break from driving and he told her that he was doing twenty hours a day so he could pay to pull a tooth.
He drove her back to the Bennigan’s. They drove through the lot but she couldn’t find her car. The cabbie called a friend of his at the municipality and sure enough her car had been towed. Cars weren’t allowed to stay overnight in that lot. The cabbie offered to help, but she thanked him and paid him and went inside to think. It was lunchtime. She ordered a drink and then she ordered a second one. The daytime bartender gave way to the nighttime bartender, and she was drunk a second day at the Bennigan’s in Stamford. She was there another five or six hours until Todd called her a cab. Todd was the nighttime bartender. When the cab came, it was the same driver. She couldn’t believe it. She drank through his night. He was getting at most three hours of sleep a day, trying to earn enough to pull his tooth. But was he fleeing his responsibilities? Was he getting drunk in her neighborhood Bennigan’s? People have such inner resources. He said, “Back to the Holiday Inn?” She went back to the Holiday Inn. Same woman at the check-in counter, same room from the night before. The next morning it was the same cabbie. “Back to the Bennigan’s?”
She asked him to help her get her car out of hock. Then she drove home. It was Monday, and Becka had already missed her first class of the week. That was the first drive she took.
She needed a place like Stamford if she was going to run away from her self-respect. Stamford was the perfect place to feel shameful. She didn’t want too much luxury around to remind her that she could afford not to be unhappy. She liked sitting at the Bennigan’s. She was attracted to it because it was just another chain in another strip mall. If it had been a real bar, the people would have been too real. It would have been the same bartender every time, the same regulars, a home away from home. But after two or three months she never saw Todd again. During her time there, there was Renell and Deirdre and Eva. There was Jerry and Ron. They knew her but they didn’t. People came and went. It was all very anonymous, perfect for getting shitfaced. The Holiday Inn was perfect for the same reasons. She got a room first so she could park the car and then she’d call Emmett. Emmett was the cabbie. He’d pick her up and drive her to the Bennigan’s. She drank Tanqueray and cranberry juice. Then she’d call Emmett to drive her back to the Holiday Inn. He worked twenty hours a day because something was nearly always wrong. He had bad teeth and an ulcer. He had high blood pressure. There were things in the future that needed fixing and things in the past that needed paying off. He couldn’t get insurance and he couldn’t pay for what the insurance would never cover. She had his cell number and on the rare occasion he wasn’t driving for the company he picked her up in his Chevy Lumina. He took care of her when she wasn’t able to take care of herself.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked her one night after helping her inside her room at the Holiday Inn.
“My husband.”
“Your husband?”
“My husband’s at home. Suffering.”
“Suffering what?”
“Suffering what?” she said. “Suffering what? Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” she roared. “HA HA HA HA HA HA!”
“Do you think this is helping him?” he asked when her laughter had finally died.
“It’s helping me,” she replied.
She failed him. She hadn’t fucked anyone, she hadn’t left him for someone new, but that was only because it was easier to drink. That’s all. With something to take a drink from, she could find the strength to care for him most of the time. But how hard was that? He was strapped to a bed. She could walk away whenever she wanted—and she did a lot of walking away. She got used to him screaming. It got so that with enough wine she could ignore him. She did a shitty job tending to his bedsores. She would fall asleep when she read out loud to him. She wasn’t in the room when he needed to talk. She kept more company with the wine. So she never left, big whoop. So she never fucked somebody else, so what?
When she wasn’t at the Bennigan’s, she moved through the house. She went from room to room feeling the massive crushing weight of it. She tried to remember why they had decided that they needed so much space. To raise Becka, of course—but how big did they expect the child to be? And did they not realize how quickly eighteen years would go by? Did they not foresee how alone they would become in that oversized house? When he was sleeping or when she chose to ignore him, she wandered from room to room, counting the beds. They had a total of eight beds, if she included his hospital bed and the pullout sofa and the twin mattress in the basement. How did they ever come to own so many beds? Who were they for? She didn’t know except to say that seven of them must have been for her. There was no one else around. If his parents had been alive or if her parents had been alive, if he had had brothers and sisters or if she had had brothers and sisters, but nobody had anything and everyone was dead. She could sleep in a different bed every night and never repeat beds for an entire week. He needed one specific type of bed and couldn’t sleep anywhere else and she sort of envied that. She loved her room at the Stamford Holiday Inn. It was too big but it had only one bed. She could move the chair and the desk and the hutch and the other chair around the bed and the room got much smaller. She was shitfaced when she was doing the moving and they always charged her for it but it was worth it. There was just one bed and with the rearranged furniture the room was the size she liked.
One night at the Bennigan’s, she counted the people at the bar. There were three couples, her, and the bartender. That made eight total, and her mind just went from there. She stood up on the barstool, on the rungs that supported its legs, and beat the bar with her hand. That got everyone’s attention. She said, “I see there are eight of us here at this bar.” The people she addressed were total strangers. “Eight of us at this bar,” she continued, “and at my home, I have eight beds.” The bartender came over to ask her to lower her voice. She couldn’t remember who exactly, Eva maybe. “Now I would like to invite every one of you over to my house,” she said, “because I have a bed for each and every one of you. I want all of you to spend the night at my house. It’s about twenty… about forty, it’s… an hour or… don’t know how far away it is…” She kept going on and on until the manager came over. He tried to get her to sit down but she wouldn’t sit down. He tried to get her to be quiet but she snapped at him. “I will not be silenced!” The manager exchanged a look with the bartender. “Please excuse us,” he said to the others at the bar. “I will not be silenced, goddamn it!” she cried. “I’m inviting these good people to spend the night at my house!” The next thing she remembered was Emmett picking her up in the women’s room, where she had fallen asleep on the floor. She had rested her cheek on the toilet seat. That was the last time she was allowed back at the Bennigan’s. From then on, she started drinking at the T.G.I. Friday’s.
13
He did not go back to work after his lunch in Bryant Park. He stopped into a men’s store to buy an overcoat and a pair of gloves to warm him as the sun waned. The day was turning steadily colder. The saleswoman cut the tags from the overcoat and he walked out wearing it. He moved along more comfortably. The luxury of being able to stop for a coat and gloves was a freedom he would never take for granted again.
He we
nt inside a corner bar. The front window was covered with thin metal latticework befitting a hermitage or cloister. He eased onto the barstool as if it were a hot bath for sore joints. With the exception of maybe his desire for a lamb kebab, his thirst for a beer had been the greatest agony. When you wanted a drink and couldn’t have one, the city turned into one long block of lounges and Irish pubs, rathskellers, beer gardens, dive bars, taprooms with a pool table in back, flickering sports bars, wine bars, hotel bars dimly lit as water cascaded down one wall, tiki bars, nightclubs and brasseries and every other conceivable watering hole, including the convenience stores where they made your beer portable with a paper sack. All of them had remained just out of reach. The people he had passed in their windows, with their coats off and half-finished pints in hand, how he had despised them.
A day laborer was drinking down the way, smoking a cigarette in violation of city ordinance and talking with the bartender, who leaned in close to him. Eventually she ventured down the bar to ask Tim what he wanted. She leaned in while he looked over the tap. After he’d made up his mind, she lifted off the bar as if it were a final push-up and poured his beer. It was garnet-colored, shot through with its own light. Tiny bubbles made a half-inch head of foam. He put the beer to his lips and drank.
This was more like it. This was being in the world.
When the bartender returned to see if he wanted another, he asked her, “Have you seen all these bees around lately?”
“Bees?”
“Honeybees.”
“I haven’t seen any bees.”
“I saw a bunch of them dead in Bryant Park just now. Do you know if bees are supposed to be around this early in the spring? Or if they hibernate?”
“I know nothing about bees,” she said. “Steve, do you know anything about bees?”