He turned away from her and stared at the ceiling, where the candles cast eerie spidery shadows. “There is no next,” he said.
“No next?”
“No next.”
“I don’t even know what that means, Edsel.”
“It means what I said.”
“But, okay, so … you were fifteen when … and now you’re … thirty-four, so it’s been”—she did the math—“nineteen years. Nineteen. Years.”
He could tell that she wished she hadn’t said this, that even though it was true and her math checked out, it brought a harsh light to bear on Bronfman’s long hiatus. One of the candles died, the wax a rising tide against the light. Then another. The darkness felt heavy against him. Because he didn’t really know, of course, whether he had been experiencing a nineteen-year hiatus at all. He didn’t know if his hiatus had ever begun.
“I’m going home,” Bronfman said.
“No,” Sheila said. “Please. You’re already naked. Just stay under the covers and go to sleep.”
But without another word he stood, and dressed. He had to get out, as if by leaving her he would somehow be able to leave himself there as well, to escape his skin. But nothing doing. Bronfman accompanied Bronfman all the way home.
EIGHT
When does a door cease to be a door? When it’s ajar. This was one of the only jokes Bronfman knew, or could remember knowing, and he trotted it out on occasion, whenever he could. He thought of it now, while driving up to his apartment, and noted, My door is not a door.
It is a jar.
From the car he saw the feeble glow from the lamp on the table beside his living-room chair; it cast barely enough light to leak through the windows, but it did. He wasn’t afraid of being robbed, since he had been robbed already and there was nothing left to steal; surely Thomas Edison would have warned his friends away from wasting their time here. So he assumed he had failed to lock it that morning. But he was too tired to think it through, too sad, oppressed with the idea of who he was and the pointless space he took up in the world.
Coco was sitting in his living-room chair, her knees drawn up to her chin, her legs encircled by her arms, barefoot, asleep. She looked like a child: innocent, uncomplicated, dreaming. But she woke on his first step past the threshold. She opened her eyes, blinked, looked around to get her bearings. But she stayed there, wrapped up in her own arms, and yawned.
“Oh,” she said. “Hey, Bronfman.”
“Hey,” he said. He was not pleased. “What’s going on? How did you get into my apartment?”
“Really? You’re asking me that? I could get into Fort Knox with the right paper clip.”
“Okay. Then why are you here?”
She shrugged, as if it was a silly question. “I thought you were gone for the evening. You’re usually back by ten or eleven. When it was, like, midnight, I thought—I needed to get out of there.” She gestured with her thumb toward Thomas Edison’s place. “Some of those dudes … it’s a different sort of clientele he’s getting these days. They’re not … you know … not as human as they used to be.” She shivered. “I had this revelation: I don’t want to trade blow jobs for drugs. You know what this means? It means I have standards, Bronfman. Who knew.” She still hadn’t moved from the chair. “So, anyway, I escaped to your place. You being gone and all, I thought it would be okay.”
He took a deep breath and slow-blinked. “Well, I’m not gone now, am I?”
This shook her. She unclasped her arms and dropped her legs to the floor. She had never heard Bronfman talk this way. Bronfman knew that, because no one in the world had heard him talk this way.
“So what, you’re saying I should go? Back over there?”
Normally, he would have said, “Do you want to stay here? I’ll sleep on the couch. You can have the bed.” But he wasn’t feeling normal. He didn’t nod. He didn’t shake his head. He just stood there, because he was done with this day. Done.
She got it. “That’s cold, Bronfman,” she said, and stood. “Really cold. But whatever.”
She tried to assemble her callous tough-girl exterior, but it wasn’t working. She bit the side of her lower lip and seemed to consider what was waiting for her ‘over there.’
“Don’t you live somewhere? Can’t you go home?”
She smiled faintly. “Home fell through,” she said. “For the time being, anyway.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. It’s all good. Everything happens for a reason. God doesn’t give us more than whatever that thing is people say.”
She clapped her hands together and took a deep breath that rose in her chest. “Okay!” she said with as much faux eagerness as she could muster. “Off I go.”
She was almost gone when she stopped and turned.
“Oh. Almost forgot. I got you this.”
From her right pocket she dug out a pen. A ballpoint pen. She held it out for Bronfman to take and, finally, he did. “For your collection,” she said.
The pen was black-and-gold, and in the dim light it was hard to tell, but the design came together soon enough. It was a leopard-skin print. He had never had a pen with a leopard-skin print on it. He squinted, and was able to read the tiny letters: “The Leopard Skin Lounge. 3001 2nd Ave. North. Birmingham, Alabama.” He had actually heard of the Leopard Skin Lounge. It was a strip club. Sorsby had mentioned having an unbelievably wild night there once. Bronfman had never gone, of course, and most likely never would, but he had the pen and that was as good as going, better even. To have this pen made him inordinately happy, happier than the circumstances of his life should have allowed. But he allowed it. And it was the second pen a woman had given him that day. He looked up from the pen to thank her—for the pen and for the short vacation from himself it had afforded him—but Coco was gone. He could almost hear her through the walls now, not laughing.
DAY
SEVENTY-THREE
ONE
Bronfman did wonder how the world was put together, in both the smallest ways and the absolute biggest as well. He wondered if there was a plan, for instance, or a meaning beyond our day-to-day lives, if there was a reason for being, and even if there was a God. And, assuming there was a God, did he actually care about humanity? And say, further, that there was a God who cared about humanity in a very general, inclusive way, could he or she possibly give the slightest damn about anything that one person out of all of it thought, did, planned, experienced, endured? Absolutely not. No way. Impossible.
But what happened next gave him pause. One of those cosmic coincidences keeping him off balance. It was this: the next day, at the very moment Bronfman thought of actually tracking down Mary Day McCauley, of finding her and calling her and asking her if she recalled whether they’d had sex together nineteen years ago—almost at the very second this thought came to him—he learned that she had died.
God! What was that about?
That morning he woke later than usual, at eight, and was tardy for work, but really, did anyone care? No one cared. No one said a thing to him. He had been on time every day for the past seven years. He thought it was important to be on time, but now that he wasn’t he saw that it didn’t matter. No one cared. What was there left to believe in if punctuality meant nothing? He couldn’t concentrate. Invoices, bills of lading, inventory adjustments … He could not bring the requisite zeal he needed to get through it all. So he set about clearing out his junk folder—the IT people encouraged it—and that’s when he got the news, on a listserv from his high school that he didn’t even know he was a part of.
Mary Day McCauley was dead.
It made him catch his breath. He read it and read it again.
Melanoma, of all things.
He read it again, because it made no sense to him. She was just a year older than he was. And engaged! Engaged to a man named Jeff Creech.
According to the obituary, she went to Auburn University and then settled down in Martinsville, where she became a chemis
try teacher and a softball coach. Not Paris but Martinsville, Alabama, half an hour away. She had lived half an hour away from where he was right this second, and he hadn’t known it. This new fact ushered in another tremor, as if knowing that she was so close would have changed anything about his life at all.
But this did: the service, her service, was today.
His heart stopped, then sluggishly resumed beating.
Today. At 11 A.M.
He looked at his watch. This was a sign. He had to go. He had to attend her service. He stood and slipped on his jacket.
“I’m going out for a bit,” he said aloud to an invisible Sorsby. Not that he needed to, but he said it anyway, more to convince himself that he was going than anything else. “Probably be back later. I have some … personal business.”
A beat. “Personal business. Well, that’s some big news, Bronfman. Big news. I’m honored you shared it with me. Allow me to applaud you.”
Sorsby had an app on his phone that simulated the sound of an audience applauding. He did it all the time for almost any reason, but this time it was for Bronfman leaving work early to go to the funeral of the only woman in the world who had ever allowed him inside her. Bronfman was beyond being bothered by one of Sorsby’s apps, though. He walked away without another word.
“Oh, wait,” Sorsby said. “I have a name.”
Bronfman stopped. “A name? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That IKEA connection you wanted? It took some finagling and skulduggery and software sleight of hand, but I found it.” A piece of paper, folded into quarters, sailed over the cubicle wall and landed on the floor beside Bronfman’s feet. “I don’t know how to put it, honestly—how doing what I’ve done for you makes me feel. To do something good for another person, something that might actually help them? It’s new for me. And I have to tell you, Bronfman, I’m uncomfortable with it. But I’ve earned a trip to heaven, for sure. I hope I’ve changed your life—and the lady’s, of course.”
Bronfman picked up the paper without looking at it and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. It had been such an important goal of his, getting this information for Sheila, becoming a hero, her hero, but it didn’t mean that much anymore. Mary Day was all he could think about. This was just a slip of paper.
“Don’t thank me,” Sorsby said. “Whatever you do.”
And Bronfman didn’t. For the first time in his life, he didn’t thank someone who had done something for him. He walked out, stiff, confused, conflicted. He didn’t even have to go home to change. The clothes he wore to work every day were perfectly appropriate for a funeral service.
* * *
It was a short drive down to Martinsville. He had been on the little highway many times. When he was a kid it was just a long, dense stretch of pine trees, but now it was one garish strip mall after another followed by fallow fields of nothing at all, old brown barns and empty silos. Everything changes for the worse. He shouldn’t do what he was doing, he thought. He wondered if he would be making this trip at all had things been different with Sheila, different in that way, intimately—had they had intercourse is what he meant, sex, a word that even in his own mind he had to think of aphoristically. Intimacy. They were almost intimate last night; they were this close. But then, according to whatever curse he suffered under, they weren’t. He wasn’t sure if he ever had, and now there was only one way to find out. He had to talk to Jeff Creech. Mary Day had probably mentioned him to her, the way Sheila told Bronfman about her amorous past. Bronfman’s name was probably sandwiched between a couple of others. Certainly she would have told him. It was so long ago, and none of that mattered anymore.
Bronfman had worked it out.
Scene: Jeff and Mary, in bed, lingering in the afterglow.
Mary Day: High school? In high school there was Corey Spaulding. He was my big heartthrob. Then, let’s see … oh, there was this guy named Bronfman, Edsel Bronfman, one crazy afternoon near the park.
Jeff Creech: Wait. His name was Bronfman? Edsel Bronfman?
Mary Day: Yes, Edsel Bronfman.
Jeff: Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha! What kind of name is that!
And then they would both have laughed at his name. Which was okay. Because the bottom line was that if anything had happened between Bronfman and Mary Day on that day in the room near the park, she would have mentioned it. She would have mentioned his name to Jeff, and this, today, was his last chance to find out if she had. So Bronfman wasn’t attending the service for Mary Day, though he was doing his best to pretend that he was. He was going for himself.
TWO
He made it to the service just as it was about to begin and sat down in the first seat he could find, which was pretty far back. He was sweaty, damp beneath his armpits and nearly feverish where the elastic in his underwear met his thighs. Around him sat row after row of silent, somber people. Was her casket here somewhere? He craned his neck but couldn’t see much, just the backs of heads and the hair on them, the black and the gray and the brown and the yellow and the red, and the other heads that had nothing on them at all—naked heads, smooth and pink, creased with neck wrinkles as thick as stomach fat.
Bronfman, adjusting himself on the cushioned pew, cleared his throat as if he were about to say something. But he didn’t say anything. A few people he knew from high school were there, from the old days—old days Bronfman really wasn’t a part of but days he claimed as his nonetheless. There was Susan Ard, right? And Martin Gage, and there—he knew his name, what was it?—Gerald? Kevin? No. Josh Knowles. How could he forget Josh Knowles, who had to carry his wallet in his front pocket because he’d accidentally been shot in the butt by his father on a hunting trip. He could see them looking around, too, same as he was. Eyes passed across his face without pausing even briefly. No one recognized him, and he was okay with that. That’s not why he was here. Someone was trying to squeeze past Bronfman’s knees—someone who had arrived even later than he had. The space between pews was too narrow for Bronfman to stand, so it was an awkward fit. Thankfully, this guy wasn’t big. Skinny. Scary skinny, actually, like a calcified scarecrow. Bronfman could feel the edge of the man’s shins on his kneecaps as he slinked past and jammed himself into the empty space, see how his wrist and half his hand disappeared beneath the scuffed cuff of his dirt-brown blazer. A bit rancid, too, the fumes hanging in the air like cartoon clouds after he passed. Perhaps this was a homeless man. Bronfman surreptitiously stole a glance at him, and—of all the people in the world it could be—it was, swear to God, Corey Spaulding.
Corey Spaulding! Poor Corey Spaulding. He looked as if he’d been put through a meat grinder and then stuffed in a bag and dragged behind a bus for a couple of miles. There was no mistaking him. Same wiry hair, same alien eyes and Mick Jagger lips, the plump kind that turned up at the corners so that he always seemed to be smiling even when he wasn’t. It was definitely him. Corey must have felt Bronfman staring at him, because he turned and gave Bronfman a searching look, as if—who knows?—maybe they knew each other. Then Corey smiled, or seemed to smile, and turned away. Bronfman wasn’t surprised. Even though Bronfman knew Corey, Corey didn’t know Bronfman, the same way Bronfman knew Barack Obama but not the other way around. Bronfman presented Corey with his hand, though, stiffly, as if he was just learning how to initiate this sort of contact. Corey looked at it as if it were a snake, but he took it in his own. “Edsel Bronfman,” Bronfman whispered, almost hissed, in the solemn quiet of the chapel. “You were a year ahead of me at Baldwin.”
Corey sort of nodded, clearly trying to place Bronfman. He couldn’t. Bronfman was unplaceable. “Yeah,” he said. “Hey.”
The service was just beginning. The priest or the minister or pastor (Bronfman was never sure what to call them, the people who did this sort of thing) welcomed the assembly and then gently launched into a spiritual biography of Mary Day: the work she did with the poor, the hungry, the homeless; she was a rock-solid friend and confidant to many; a great teacher and softball coach
, taken from the world too young, a lifetime of such promise we cannot help but mourn. It was tragic and senseless.
“That’s the fucking truth,” Corey muttered, not to Bronfman or to anybody, unless it was God. “This makes no fucking sense at all.”
Bronfman figured that more than half the church was crying now. Even Corey had tears rolling down his battered cheeks, and Bronfman wondered why he wasn’t crying, too. He wasn’t even close to tears. Then he understood: he wasn’t at the service. He was still in the park. He was in that apartment. He was remembering Mary Day alive, with him, and that wasn’t distressing at all. That was a happy thought. That was the happy thought. He was celebrating her, not mourning her, and he bet she would have wanted it this way.
A number of other people, including her fiancé, Jeff Creech, stood up to say a few words. Jeff was a bigger man than Bronfman had imagined him to be. He looked like a football player who’d gone to seed, broad-shouldered, tall, but heavy in the stomach. Then it was over, and Bronfman realized that he’d zoned out during Jeff’s speech, his mind elsewhere, stuck in that room with Mary Day. Everyone filed out to the church parking lot. Bronfman walked with Corey, even though Corey didn’t appear to be walking with him.
It was hot outside. The sun baked the asphalt until it was spongy; it gave a little beneath his feet. In the bright light, it was possible to see the full extent of Corey’s disintegration. All his good looks, his charm, that devil-may-carelessness, had all worn themselves out. The rings beneath his eyes looked as if they’d been dug out of dirt with a garden hoe, and his thinning hair—no longer long and golden, it was tarnished now, like old bronze—looked as if it had been cut and styled by a blind man. And his teeth—his teeth, once so wolfish and bright—had yellowed like old ivory.
Bronfman didn’t want to think the thought he had then, but he thought it anyway. O, how the mighty have fallen. It was an inappropriate thought, for a handful of reasons. First, Corey hadn’t really been that mighty. He had just been a kid who had grown up faster than Bronfman had, had more skills, was handsome and strong and alive in the world. He seemed mighty back then, but perspective is skewed when you’re young, when you’re envious of something so small as where a classmate is going on spring break. Also, here, at Mary Day’s service, to have a thought like this was particularly churlish. And, finally, that thing which distinguished Corey more than anything else—his relationship with Mary Day—was something Bronfman shared, if only briefly, that Saturday afternoon near the park. As unremarkable as Bronfman had turned out to be, as invisible to the world as he was, he had somehow ended up in a better place than Corey. That was just a fact. And it was nice not to be the guy at the end of the line, for once.