The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “I know you think it’s ridiculous,” Hugh said, but not as if it really mattered.

  “Look, I have another question. Why did you ignore those girls? Why did you seem so hell-bent on ending up alone or—worse!—still talking to me when you could be off seducing any one of them?”

  Hugh picked up a stick and hurled it toward the tar-colored water. He tried to light a cigarette, but his lighter was jammed. “My heart’s bashed in,” he said.

  “Your heart? Your heart is fine.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Your heart is fine.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Hearts are very resilient.”

  “I’m sure yours is.”

  “That’s true,” Ed said. He was thinking not of Marla or any number of missed possibilities but of a girl he’d met in New Haven while tailgating two weeks ago; they drank bourbon from her brother’s flask. “It is.”

  Hugh finally lit his cigarette and seemed marginally less pathetic. “Every now and then I’ll take a girl out, even go to bed with her, but it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, no matter who it is. I’m all broken up. Have been for years.”

  “I see that. So who did this to you? Who bashed Hugh Shipley’s weak and feeble heart? I’ll change her mind.”

  Hugh started laughing, a great unruly laugh, the kind that can change a mood entirely and stop a night’s potential downslide. “I bet you could,” he said.

  Ed jumped up on a bench and jumped off it, up and down until he was out of breath. “Tell me something funny.”

  “Funny,” Hugh said, as if he was about to recite a dismal poem. But when he spoke up again, he was animated, maybe more than he’d been all night. “All right. I was sent to an Episcopal boarding school when I was eleven.”

  “Eleven? Jesus, I said funny—not Dickensian.”

  “I’m getting there. At this school—where, by the way, I refused to take communion—I was … exploring the storage room in one of the main buildings and of course I was smoking and I opened up a can of potassium sulfate or nitrate—I still can’t remember which one it was—”

  “I’m guessing nitrate.”

  “Right. And it exploded. Not supposed to be combustible, but I’m telling you I nearly burned the school down. This was unintentional and unconscious, until I read all of Freud during the summer of my senior year and had some fairly major revelations about unconscious desire.”

  “I’m still waiting for the funny part.”

  “So there I was, running up the stairs with this impromptu bomb, and I threw the bomb in the toilet. Clouds of smoke billowing, I was coughing—terrified—but what happened when I had the opportunity to let it all burn? That school that I hated? That venerable institution where my father broke all the records for athletics, including my grandfather’s? Did I let it burn? Of course not. I saved it!” Hugh was laughing now, and Ed tried to but couldn’t stick with it.

  “I saved the school. I did. That’s the way I saw it, at least. After the smoke cleared—so to speak—the headmaster took one look at me and said, ‘Now I know I’m going to be able to kick you out of this school.’ He was thrilled to finally have a good enough reason. But in the end—here’s the funny part—he couldn’t because my father was, and still is, an important trustee. Ridiculous,” he said, laughing again. “So completely ridiculous. I nearly burned their school to the ground and still they kept me around.”

  “What did your father say?”

  “Well, I’m fairly certain he was just relieved that I wasn’t coming home. One of my father’s favorite routines was to talk about how boring children were and to construct the kind of conversations he wished he could simply have had with the help, with regard to looking after me when I was a child. See that pile of money over there, he would say, go on, over there, that pile in the corner—take it. Yes, the PILE. Take the PILE, just take care of the boy and for God’s sake don’t tell me about each sneeze!”

  “I’ve never met him, but you’re a pretty good mimic,” Ed admitted.

  “The man can still make me laugh even though I basically hate him.”

  “I don’t hate my father,” said Ed, not because it was true but because he could never imagine saying so, certainly not to Hugh Shipley, not to someone whose father didn’t understand what it meant to do any kind of work, not to mention the kind of backbreaking work that his father still did as a steamfitter, laying pipes in the ground, getting coated with dirt and unspecified grime, often narrowly escaping electrical fires because of what he called Depression cheapo wiring.

  “That’s good,” said Hugh. “I’m happy for you.” He tossed his cigarette and sat down on the bench.

  “Is your mother funny, too?”

  “My mother’s dead.”

  “Oh,” said Ed. “Oh.”

  “A long time ago,” said Hugh, as if Ed had asked. “I barely remember her.”

  The river and the sky were far off in the distance, and all that felt real was the bench where Hugh was seated and the stubble of grass underfoot. Ed sat down on the bench, too. He wanted to say something, if for no other reason than he was uncomfortable with silence. He hated to sit in silence with anyone. He hated hearing other people’s uncomfortable sounds—their toe-tapping, their throat-clearing, their quiet cracking-of-knuckles. He hated how driven he felt to make the silence stop, how a roar of discomfort filled his own head like a giant wave crashing to shore. Every few summers, his mother had prevailed and borrowed from the credit union so that they could go to Nantasket Beach, and that cold Atlantic once gave him the tossing of his life; he’d never forgotten the roar of it as the wave drew him up and over. The more he didn’t say to Hugh, the more he withheld words of kindness or humor or whatever the hell he was supposed to say, the more absurd it felt to be there, hearing that ocean’s roar. Why couldn’t he simply say I’m sorry, the way that Hugh had done earlier this evening? I’m sorry. Hugh had said it strong and clear, and here Ed was, unable to say a word. They were strangers, he thought. They’d remain so.

  But then whatever profound awkwardness he’d been feeling, whatever definitive wrongness, mysteriously tapered off and, like the halting of a violent storm, what was left felt akin to good fortune. As Saturday’s rising sun became a sudden and tremendous possibility, what remained was nothing more extraordinary than two grown motherless sons.

  What also remained was this: They were—despite sharing not a single interest or goal—going to be friends.

  I grabbed Hugh’s arm. I said, “Just keep walking.” I must have been out of my mind, okay? But that’s exactly what Hugh did.

  I felt this … grip … on my arm, and what do you know, it was Ed. I thought, My God, this fellow is in some kind of state.

  When they told this story many years later, both men said they could never remember how they’d gone from Ed’s tight grip to sitting in Cronin’s sharing a ham sandwich, but that wasn’t true, because Ed had always remembered. He’d followed Hugh; he’d dropped a squashed bottle cap, brushed grass off his trousers, and run after him. He never forgot.