“Going to bed.”
“The meat is still on the counter,” he said. “There’s food everywhere. Are we just going to let it go to waste? And aren’t you worried about your friends?”
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“Should you really be reading a book right now?”
“What else would you suggest I do?”
“I don’t know. Go over to their apartment? See if they’re there?”
“I need to wait here in case I get a call from a hospital, or in case they show up.”
He sat down on the bed. He put his head in his hands. He heard the slow turn of one page after another, and then, deeper in the ears, the squishy beat of his sobering heart.
“Well,” he said, looking up. “Would you like me to go over there?”
“What are you going to do about it, big man? Man of steel? Gonna get inside the Absolutmobile and go find the big danger?”
He stared at her.
“It’s too bad we can’t have children,” she said. “If she was ever abducted, what better daddy to go and save her?”
“Her? Is that right? Is it a her?”
“I guess it would be important for you to have a boy, wouldn’t it? So you could pass along all these masculine skills of yours. All your big-man powers.”
He stood up from the bed.
“Do you want me to go over there or not?”
He had been to their apartment a handful of times, but never with so many people in it. It was a sizable apartment with a quirky floor plan and a proliferation of rooms that seemed to spool out one after another. He stepped inside and saw the first of the bedrooms pulsing with a lot of carefully curated candlelight. He saw silhouettes of people there and more in the room to his right. People were coming and going from the kitchen, some louder than others. He did not recognize the man who had opened the door for him.
“Is there a party going on?” he asked.
“Are you a neighbor?”
“Old friend.”
“There’s beer in the fridge,” the man said. He closed the door and turned back to his conversation.
The noisy talk was now crisper than it had been in the hall outside, where he had first picked up on its underwater strains and thought it must be coming from some other apartment. He hesitated before finally drifting down the small corridor to the kitchen. Here, too, the light was dim. More votives cast shadows against the chrome appliances and the ceiling-mounted pots and pans and all the people standing in clusters against the black marble counter. Someone reached into the fridge. The bright, telescoping light broke the ambience, and the door falling shut just as quickly restored it. “The last one of those, you bastard?” someone said. The one addressed mimicked smashing the bottle on the speaker’s head. There was more mimicry of hand-to-hand combat as he drifted out of the kitchen.
He made his way through the rooms. He saw no one he recognized. It was hard to see in the low light, and some people, in the middle of conversations, had their backs to him. He did not want to go around tapping on shoulders or craning his neck conspicuously. He felt self-conscious despite the anonymity afforded by the darkness. He regretted not getting a drink while he was in the kitchen, not only because it had been a while, and because alcohol was helpful in these situations, but because without a drink in hand he felt that much more out of place.
He ended up by the gas fireplace below the mantel and mirror. Solid blue flames licked over fake logs with bulky knots, radiating a dry and passionless heat. No smoke, no ash. Just a steady dull and decorous burn. He stared at it until his eyes began to hurt, letting the competing voices behind him blend into one festive, gibbering blur. When he looked up again, his eyes had hung a scrim of fire between him and the world. He could see only the vaguest shapes, the crudest outlines of people and walls, and then only at his periphery. He waited for the image to dissolve, but before it did completely a familiar voice said, “Well, look who it is.”
He blinked to quicken his vision, which helped, but he didn’t think it could be possible. “Ben?” he said.
“Lauren and I were just wondering where you could be,” Ben said.
“We had plans,” he found himself saying, “earlier in the evening.”
“Where’s Amy?”
“She’s home,” he said. He added, “Not feeling well.”
“Oh, no,” Ben said. “The flu?”
“Flulike,” he said. “Where’s Lauren?”
Ben turned around as if to locate Lauren. When he turned back, he spoke at a much lower register. “Listen, buddy, to your left, at ten o’clock? I’m going to pivot you, okay?” Ben reached out with his beer in hand and turned him a fraction. “Now she’s at noon, right over my shoulder. See her? Do you know who that is?”
“She’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful? Buddy,” he said, “do you have any idea who that woman is?”
“I don’t know who any of these people are,” he said.
Before he could study the woman any closer, he felt a hand on his arm. The grip was thin and hard, shrill, and when he turned to face the gripper, he was face-to-face with Amy’s old friend. “Well,” he said. “Do you know that we’ve been looking for you?”
“Stay right where you are, Ben,” she said. “I have something important to tell you.” She turned from Ben and addressed him. “Walk with me.”
With her grip on him now tighter, she led him through the rooms quickly, much faster than he’d meandered through them on his own. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked. “We’ve been looking for you all night, and you’re having a goddamn party?”
“You promised to wait for me!” she said to a group of people who turned to her all at once.
“Oh, I won’t tell it without you,” a man said, and someone laughed.
She turned back with a smile that quickly disappeared.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you listening to me?”
“Can you please wait?” she asked, without looking at him.
“Where are we going?”
She returned him to the foyer. She finished what was left in her glass and placed it on the floor.
“Should you really be drinking?” he asked.
“It’s cranberry juice,” she said. She opened the door, and they stepped out into the hallway. She waited for the door to close behind her.
“Who invited you to this party?” she asked.
“Who invited me?” he said. “No one invited me. We had dinner plans tonight, the four of us, and you stood us up.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We did not have dinner plans.”
“I’m afraid, yes, we did,” he said. “We made a huge spread for you guys and bought some very expensive meat, and then I come here and find out you’re having a big party.”
“Now, why would we throw a big party on a night we had plans with you?”
“Why wouldn’t we get an invitation if you were throwing a big party?” he asked.
She didn’t have an answer. People considered her pretty, but she had puffy cheeks and a pouty mouth that had annoyed him from the beginning, even against his will. He had wanted to like her at first, but her kind of mouth he associated with spoiled brats, and her voice didn’t help, nor did the words she spoke. He felt sorry for that baby.
“Can’t answer that, can you?” he said.
“Let me ask you something,” she said. Her mouth, trembling a little, had never looked more punitive or ugly. “Why do you pretend to like us? Why do you invite us to dinner parties when everyone knows you don’t like us, that you’ve been full of contempt for us from the very beginning?”
He was surprised by the forwardness of the question. He was tempted to argue the point. How could she know for certain who he did and did not like?
Instead, he said, “For Amy.” She was silent. “Well, you asked,” he said.
“This party is by invitation only,” she said, “and we specifically did not invite you.”
“So you don
’t invite me or Amy, your oldest friend Amy, but you invite my friend Ben?”
“We met Ben at one of your dinner parties.”
“I know how you met him.”
“And he and Lauren have since become friends.”
“Who was that woman?” he asked.
“What woman?”
“The woman standing in front of me when I was talking to Ben.”
“I must not be making myself very clear,” she said.
“Okay, forget it,” he said, “forget it. You don’t want me here. That’s fine. But I came because Amy was worried about you when you didn’t show up for dinner. So what am I supposed to say to her when I go home knowing that you couldn’t come to our dinner party because you have a big party going on yourself, and that you specifically didn’t invite her?”
She stared at him. Her arms were folded and her head was a little cocked, as if they were having a lovers’ quarrel, but her face was suddenly calm and expressionless.
“You want to know what I think of you?” she asked.
He was having a hard time reading her face. It was now so blank and flat and calm. He had no idea what she was thinking. It was as if she were a different person.
“I think Amy made a terrible mistake marrying you,” she said. “I tried to tell her that, but I couldn’t do it the way I should have. Amy and I have nothing, absolutely nothing in common anymore, and I’m sorry but I blame you for that, because it’s so awful to have to see you and talk about you, and to think that she’s going to be alone with you for the rest of her life just breaks my heart.”
He began to walk away. He stopped and turned back. “You’re barbarians,” he said. “Both of you.”
“Don’t come here again,” she said to him as he was walking away. “Don’t call, either. Not tonight, and not tomorrow.”
“I can’t wait to go home and tell Amy. She’s going to love this.”
“I wish I could say I cared,” she said.
He took a taxi home. In the backseat, he replayed the conversation again and again with such intensity that he began to grit his teeth. He couldn’t believe all the many awful things she had said to him. They were outrageous, offensive, and final. He hardly saw anything out the car window, but he could vividly picture her mouth and then the blank expression that had preceded her outburst, which worked him up even more.
When he paid the cab and stepped out, his anger had lessened considerably through too much concentration on it. He wanted it to take hold again with its strangling grip, so he thought of the kitchen: all those dishes in the sink, the expensive meat spoiling on the butcher block.
He walked through the front door and called out to her. He went through the apartment to the bedroom. The bed was unmade in that corner where she had lain reading her book, and the book itself was on the duvet, but she was not there. He glanced in the bathroom before leaving the bedroom and walking back through the apartment, this time turning on all the overhead lights. He stopped at the closet and took an accounting of the coats, then he hurried on to the kitchen, where everything was as it had been a few hours earlier, including her rings on the counter. He was that future self in search of her that he had many times foretold but always dismissed as an impossibility. She had left him. It was dizzying. He had to steady himself against the fridge. He wanted nothing more than to have her there so that he could tell her everything about the evening—what cruel fun, what compensation—but she was gone.
When he returned to the bedroom, she was there. How, he didn’t know. She was sitting upright on his side of the bed with her back to him. His relief was immense. He crossed the room and saw in the light coming through the blinds that her eyes were open. She must have known he was there, but she didn’t look at him. She just continued to blink in a distant way.
“They were home,” he said. He let that sink in. “Can you believe it? They were home that whole time.”
She closed her eyes. He prepared what delicious thing he was going to say next. He wanted to go back now and start at the beginning, at the strangeness of those first few party sounds he had picked up on in the hallway. With an economical and unsentimental gesture, she wiped a tear away before resettling her hand on her leg. He wasn’t expecting her to cry.
He thought about how worried she had been when they didn’t show up. He thought about how much pride she took in her cooking and how much effort she had made for them. It couldn’t have been easy, knowing the nature of their good news.
He sat down beside her on the bed and put his arm around her. “They were sleeping,” he said. “I had to buzz them so many times just to wake them up. And she was so sorry. She said to me so many times how sorry she was.”
She got off the bed and went into the other room. One minute he was holding her, and the next he felt the enormity of the empty bed. He called out to her. She didn’t respond. He called out to her a second time. He thought about getting up and going to her, but that was usually no longer helpful. He heard her rummaging through the closet. When she came back in, he was lying down. She switched on the overhead light, which he happened to be staring at. His eyes burned and he turned away. The next thing he knew, she had placed a roller bag on the bed and was unzipping it.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was a totally predictable thing to do, to pack a bag, and yet completely outrageous. It was both dramatic and futile. Where did she plan to go?
“You’re being ridiculous,” he said. “Please stop. What does this have to do with me?”
She slowed down. She moved a few more things into the bag, and then, with a gesture that was full of rage and yet halfhearted, she threw in a pair of socks. She seemed to recognize that what she was doing was preposterous, though nothing else appropriate or imaginable had come to her. She stood still in front of the bag. He got off the bed and took her in his arms.
“She just forgot,” he said. “That’s all. You know her.”
She began to sob. She heaved into his shoulder as he held her. Hot tears came through his shirt.
“Why do I have this life?” she asked.
Her arms dropped to her side and she went limp. She cried as if he were not holding her, as if he were not in the room with her, as if he were not in the world at all.
The Valetudinarian
The day after Arty Groys moved to Florida to pursue the leisures of retirement in that paradisal climate, his wife was killed in a head-on collision with a man fleeing the state to escape the discovery of frauds perpetuated for a dozen years under the guise of good citizenship. Arty found himself bereft in a strange land. He knew none of the street names or city centers. His condominium was underfurnished and undecorated. The cemetery where Meredith was buried was too bright and too hot, both on the day of interment and every visit thereafter. Whenever Arty had imagined one of them at the other’s funeral, he pictured rain, black-clad figures under black umbrellas, the cumbersome dispersal of the gathered through mud in the lowest of spirits. He saw Meredith leaning down to grasp at one last incorporeal memory as their daughter Gina bent to encourage her to stand, both women weeping—for it was always Arty who had died in Arty’s daydreams. But on the day they laid Meredith to rest, golf and tennis were beckoning to retirees in radiant waves of sun, and the fishermen of Tarpon Cove were sporting cheerfully with the devilish snook.
To the surprise of his children, Arty didn’t return to Ohio. Over the course of time, they got the sense that their father had stalled, then that his wheels had shifted into reverse, and then that he was heading backward at full speed, toward some oncoming atrocity—their mother’s death in reverse, this time entirely psychological. He was without responsibilities after a long professional career, and now he was without the one person, helpmeet and bickering companion, who could shake him out of the recliner and into the world.
His worst instincts claimed him. He started a feud with Mrs. Zegerman, his neighbor in Bequia Cove Towers, a tall co
ndominium building overlooking Naples Bay just south of the Tamiami Trail. Arty suggested in a note slipped under Mrs. Zegerman’s door that her Shih Tzu, Cookie, whose incessant yapping came right through the walls, deserved to be shot by Nazis. Mrs. Zegerman accused him of being an anti-Semite; Arty countered that he was not an anti-Semite but an anti–Shih Tzu and that all Shih Tzus should be rounded up. A few days later, Mrs. Zegerman found an unopened box of rat poison near the potted phlox beside her welcome mat, and tensions escalated from there.
In other respects, Arty withdrew. His brooding caused him to lose golf partners and other acquaintances and alienated him somewhat from his one true friend, fit and generous Jimmy Denton. Jimmy had come down to Florida after making a killing in the Danville (Illinois, not Connecticut) real estate market. Jimmy had taken Arty golfing and talked baseball with him, but now it was growing late on Arty’s birthday, and he had not yet received a call from Jimmy or from any of his children. He was starting to feel as unloved as he had the day of his ninth birthday, when only two of the eleven guests showed up to his party, a pair of twins who took off their shirts and came together at the arm to show where they had been surgically separated.
He was instantly relieved to hear the first ring of the phone, an old rotary that vibrated with the vigor of the Mechanical Age. He let it rumble and stop, rumble and stop, three full times so that the caller would not suspect how lonely he was. After the third ring he snatched it up. He let the pause grow and then said a very casual hello. It was his daughter, Gina, who lived by herself in a horse stable in Belmont.
“Happy birthday, Daddy!” she cried into his ear. “Happy birthday, happy birthday!”
“Is that you, Gina? God bless you for calling, my girl,” said Arty. “Happy birthday to me. Yes, happy birthday to your old man.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier, Daddy.”
“Oh, I didn’t even notice,” said Arty.