The Happiest People in the World

by Brock Clarke

  “Ouch,” Henry said. Kurt opened one eye, saw who it was standing over him, closed the eye again.

  “Where’s my skateboard?” Kurt said, even though it was still in his right hand.

  “You might be hurt,” Henry said.

  “Or I might be . . . ,” Kurt said, but he didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he sat up, and Henry got a good whiff of what Kurt might be. Oh, buddy, he thought but did not say. “. . . High,” Kurt said, finishing the sentence.

  “You do smell high,” Henry said.

  “Please don’t tell my father,” Kurt said.

  “Does that mean I can tell your mother?” Henry said. Although he had no intention of telling anyone anything. He was not a psychiatrist or a doctor, and even less a lawyer or a priest, and in any case he had taken no oath of patient-counselor confidentiality. But that was one of his policies, unwritten and unspoken but by now well known: if a student told him something and did not want Henry to pass the information on to the student’s parents or teachers or whomever, then Henry would not. Usually, if a student felt bad enough about something that he confessed to it and then asked Henry to keep the information secret, then the student would end up either spilling the beans himself or he would just stop doing it.

  “I guess not,” Kurt said, and then he started crying. Crying and crying. The kind of crying where you didn’t care who sees or hears. Lots of people were seeing and hearing, too: buses, cars, pedestrians, passed by and gawked, and still Kurt wept. The public weeping produced a great feeling of residual Scandinavian embarrassment in Henry, and at first he began hugging Kurt in an attempt to just get him to stop crying in the presence of all these other people. But Kurt did not stop, he kept weeping, and suddenly Henry had an image of the near future. In two days, Ellen and Henry would be married. They had transformed the four apartments above the Lumber Lodge into a home: a television room, a kitchen, a bathroom in the hall, a master bedroom for Henry and Ellen, and a bedroom for Kurt. Kurt had not yet moved into the bedroom: Ellen had felt very strongly that he not do so until she and Henry were legally wed. But anyway, Henry had a vision of the room in the near future, and in it there were posters on the wall, dirty socks everywhere, and also, of course, a bed, and on the bed Kurt was weeping, and Henry was hugging him and telling him that everything was going to be just fine, just like a real father would tell his real son, except if that were true, then why in the middle of the night was the real son sliding a piece of paper under the real father’s door with the real father’s real name on it, crossed out with a big black X?

  Henry went to break their embrace, but Kurt had already done so. He wasn’t crying anymore. Instead he was looking at Henry the way Henry had been planning to look at him, eyes wide open. I think I know what you did, the look said. I think I know who you are.

  Please don’t tell your mother, Henry thought but did not say, because he was afraid to say anything, and also because Kurt had already remounted his skateboard. “I wonder if the stranger will show up again today,” he said, and then he skateboarded off.

  52

  Three thirty, Thursday afternoon. Matty was in his office. The school buses had left; the stranger had not arrived. Matty had been thinking about him all day. Matty felt that his reappearance was somehow key to stopping Ellen from marrying Henry in two days. Two days, two days. Then, two knocks on the door. “Come in,” Matty said, but his secretary, Gina, was already coming in. Gina was a small woman, always armed with small yellow sticky notes. She was holding one now.

  “I just got a call from accounting,” she said.

  “Huh,” Matty said. They were always getting calls from the state education board’s accounting office. Usually they wanted to know why the school had bought the second-cheapest kind of volleyball instead of the cheapest, why they’d purchased two sacks of rock salt instead of just one, etc. Matty extended his hand, and Gina gave him the note. On it was a bunch of numbers.

  “And this is . . .”

  “A telephone number,” Gina said. “In Denmark.”

  “OK.”

  “You called it from your office phone.”

  “I did not,” Matty said, but his mind was already at work, asking who, why, and of course when. “When?”

  “Last night,” Gina said. “A little after eleven.”

  Eleven o’clock the night before. Matty had been home, in the kitchen, next to the woodstove, watching TV. Kurt had been there, too, if Matty was looking for an alibi. But he wasn’t, necessarily, and he wasn’t necessarily worried about accounting, either. All accounting wanted was for you to be aware that they knew what you were doing, and to not do it again.

  “Huh,” Matty said. “And what else did accounting say?”

  “They said don’t do it again.”

  “Don’t do what again?” Ellen said. She was behind Gina, and as soon as Gina heard her voice, she exited the scene, the way you do when the boss’s ex-wife enters. Ellen entered. It felt illicit to have Ellen in his office, alone. Matty had to stop himself from saying something ridiculous, something like, I want to start our life together again, right now. Instead, Matty gestured for her to sit in the empty red plastic chair to the left of the door. Ellen shook her head, then leaned against the wall, left eyebrow raised (which she’d always done), arms crossed, frowning (which she had never done). She must have picked it up from Henry. Ellen was close enough for Matty to smell her cigarette-smoke smell if she’d smelled of smoke, which she didn’t. Henry had probably made her quit. No, Henry never made anyone do anything. But he’d probably helped her quit. Henry, Henry. Two days, two days. In two days, Ellen would be married to Henry, but only if Matty couldn’t help it.

  “Don’t do what again?” Ellen asked a second time.

  “Call Denmark on my office phone,” Matty said.

  “Denmark,” Ellen repeated, arms uncrossed now, but still frowning. She sat in the chair. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Huh.” Ellen said. “Then who did?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Matty said. He leaned back in his chair, being quiet, trying to let Ellen come to her own conclusion, which Matty wanted to be identical to his own conclusion. This, of course, was also known as the Socratic method. At Cornell, Matty had been taught that the Socratic method was intellectually bankrupt. Which is not to say that it wasn’t effective.

  “It has to be Jens Baedrup,” Ellen said. “The Danish stranger who came to Henry’s office.”

  Matty nodded. “That was my first thought, too. And I guess it could be him.” He paused to think, or pretend to. “But the school was locked. He’d have to have gotten a key from someone.”

  “Who has keys?”

  “Everyone who works here has keys to the front doors,” Matty said. Then, again, he stopped talking, long enough to allow Ellen to think, Well, then, it could have been lots of people, and then to counterthink, But who among those lots of people would want to call Denmark?

  “Why would he have used your phone?” Ellen said, and Matty did not miss the pronoun. He, Matty thought but did not say. Because Matty wanted to appear in all ways principalic: fair minded, objective, an indisputably good guy.

  “Maybe because there are only two outside lines in the whole school: mine and Gina’s. And Gina locks her office door at night.”

  “You don’t lock yours?”

  “Nope,” Matty said, and he shrugged, as though to say, I know, stupid, huh, but hey, my office door is always unlocked, that’s the kind of good guy I am and always have been. And anyway, everything Matty had said so far was absolutely true, were Ellen inclined to check. She didn’t seem inclined. Ellen pulled her blond hair off her forehead, held it, then let it fall back. Her hair, her hair. Matty had always found it incredibly soft, less like hair and more like white-blond feathers, with slightly darker blond roots.

  “What time?” Ellen said.

  “What time,” Matty repeated, trying to buy himself some. Gina had said, �
��A little after eleven.” Henry had probably been with Ellen then, in the bar, or upstairs, waiting for her to close the bar. Henry couldn’t have made the phone call then. A few hours before that, Henry was in the bar, telling everyone the stranger’s name. A few hours before that everyone had been wondering about the stranger, and Ellen had been wondering about Henry. “I wonder where Henry is,” Matty had heard Ellen wonder several times in the three hours between when Henry had left the baseball game and when he’d shown up at the bar. As for Matty himself, he’d gotten to the bar a little before five o’clock.

  “A little after five o’clock,” Matty said. It was the only lie he’d told over the past couple of minutes, and in the end he would have cause to regret it. Also, by this point, Matty had stopped wondering who had actually made the phone call, and had dedicated himself to suggesting that most likely it was Henry. He would later have cause to regret that, too. “Five seventeen, to be exact,” he said.

  “Huh.” Ellen again. She was biting her lip, eyes pinched, remembering who had been where and when yesterday, doing the math. Matty let her do it. Then, when she’d done it for long enough, he reminded her, “Hey, tomorrow’s Kurt’s band concert.”

  “Right,” she said, and even as distracted as she was, she made a face. Kurt played trumpet in the school band’s annual October concert, which was always a somewhat painful experience. The band director, Mr. Ferraro, had never quite gotten over the rock music of his youth, the greatness of which he was convinced was a product of the era’s spontaneity, which led him to forsake regular rehearsals, and which also led him to have the kids perform wildly inappropriate material. Last year, for instance, their finale was the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and when some parents complained, Mr. Ferraro pointed out that the kids did not actually sing the lyrics (which was true, although Mr. Ferraro did mouth the words during the enthusiastic prosecution of his conducting) and that, besides, the kids’ version was “much more brass than ass,” which did not necessarily help Mr. Ferraro’s cause with the parents but was nonetheless also true.

  Anyway, the concert was to begin at 2:55 tomorrow. Matty and Ellen always went to Kurt’s public events—in addition to band, he was on the track team—together. It was important to Kurt, Ellen said. Of course, Kurt had never said so himself. Nevertheless, it was a good thing, Ellen said. Matty supposed that was right. He also supposed it was a good thing that Henry sat apart from them during these performances. “We’re Kurt’s parents,” Ellen had said before last year’s concert. “It’s important that Kurt sees us together. Henry would probably just be a distraction.”

  “That’s true!” Matty had said, maybe a little too enthusiastically, because Ellen had raised an eyebrow and said, “Yeah, it was Henry’s idea.”

  “Henry!” Ellen was saying now. Because there he was, standing in the doorway, looking at Ellen, a huge, toothy, very un-Henry-like smile on his face. Love, love, Matty thought, it made you into something you were not. Wow, I hate you, Matty thought but did not say to Henry. But then he noticed that Ellen wasn’t exactly smiling at Henry the way he was smiling at her. “Where . . . ,” she started to ask. Then she glanced at Matty and said, “Where were you?”

  Then Henry began looking more like Henry. He frowned. Crossed his arms. Ellen turned to Matty to explain. “We’re supposed to go to Walmart to buy wedding stuff, and then back to the Lodge to decorate.” Then she turned back to Henry. “You were supposed to meet me at three thirty!” she said. Henry glanced at his watch, and Matty at his. It was only 3:32. When he looked up again, Henry and Ellen were walking out of his office. Without even saying good-bye. Although Matty wasn’t thinking too much about that. He was instead thinking about Ellen. “Where were you?” Ellen had asked Henry. But Matty knew what she’d wanted to ask. She’d wanted to ask, Where were you at five seventeen last night?” When, Matty wondered, would she ask that question? And how would Henry answer when she did?

  53

  How many times had Ellen been about to ask the question? Once, when they’d stood in the PARTY aisle at Walmart, trying to decide how much yardage of streamers they would need and in what colors; twice, at Comstock’s Food and Beverage Wholesale Distributors, listening to Bill Comstock Sr. congratulate himself on what a great deal he was giving them on kegs of Michelob because, hey, she was a longtime, valued customer, and hey, she was getting married, but hey, don’t expect the same great deal if she got married again, that is, if they even made Michelob at that future date and time, because as it was, pretty much no one drank it anymore, even though it used to be one of their biggest sellers, but anyway, you’re welcome; thrice, at the gas station, looking back out the passenger’s side-view mirror as Henry filled up the tank in her truck with regular unleaded. Now, for the fourth time—was there another way to say “the fourth time”?—at the Lumber Lodge. It was six o’clock; the place was pretty much empty, except for two old guys whom Ellen remembered from back when she was a girl and her mother ran the bar and who always only drank their beer out of juice glasses, and Ellen herself, and Henry, who was sitting at the bar, addressing a basket of chicken wings. Until very recently, Henry had watched in disbelief as the drunks at the Lumber Lodge ate those grotesque bird parts by the dozens. How can you eat that stuff? his pinched face had always seemed to want to know. But now apparently he knew; now he couldn’t stop eating the things. Although he also couldn’t seem to quite make himself believe that they really were chicken wings.

  “They’re so small,” he said to Ellen, who was standing behind the bar. “Are these really the wings of a chicken?”

  “Yes,” Ellen said. Although really she had no idea. Now that he mentioned it, they didn’t look like the wings of any chicken she’d ever seen. Some of them were drumsticks, not wings at all. But they did come in an enormous bag that said CHICKEN WINGS. “That’s what it says on the bag,” Ellen said. But it didn’t seem to matter to him what they were: Henry kept eating them. If he didn’t stop, eventually he’d get fat, like everyone else. But for now, here he was, the slimmest, most handsome chicken-wing-eating Swede Ellen had ever seen. A Swede, not a Dane, right? She wondered that, because why would a Swede be calling Denmark at 5:17 at night from Matty’s phone? Did you call Denmark from Matty’s office phone last night at five seventeen? Ellen almost asked him, for the fourth time. But she didn’t. There is a kind of IOU embedded in the psyche of the about-to-be-wed, the postponement of the paying of the bet that is the marriage itself. I’ll forgive, or ignore, this latest thing, the engaged thinks. But if there’s one more thing . . . Although maybe this wasn’t limited to people who were preparing to be married. After all, Ellen had made similar promises to herself about Matty when she was still married to him, until finally there was the one more thing, which was Henry.

  “Did I ever tell you,” Ellen said, “the name of the woman Matty cheated on me with?” When Ellen said that, she thought of Matty—not of him cheating on her, but of how he, in their distant past life together, had gently teased her about ending sentences with prepositions. Later on, in their more recent past life together, the teasing had been so ungentle that it couldn’t be called teasing. But back further, when Kurt was a baby, a toddler, the teasing was gentle, full of love. Those were good times, Ellen thought, and then thought, Why am I thinking about this now? Meanwhile, Henry was still working on his wings. She’d never talked about this before with Henry. In some ridiculous but definite way, she thought talking about it would diminish her in Henry’s eyes. And if it did that now, if she told him about Locs and Matty, and Henry looked or acted or talked about it as though her talking about it made her a lesser person, then that would be the one more thing. “Her name was Locs.” Henry didn’t react; he was busy stripping the meat from the bones with his teeth. Had he always eaten this loudly? Maybe he hadn’t even heard her over the deafening crunching of his disgusting wing eating. Ellen said, louder this time, “Locs!” This time Henry flinched.

  “Yes, I heard you,�
�� Henry said. He placed the last gnawed bone in the basket, wiped his hands on a napkin, crumpled it, threw it in the basket also. “Locs,” he repeated. “Was that her first or last name?”

  “Neither.”

  Henry nodded as though this made sense. He stood up and walked behind the bar until he was standing in front of her. He put his hands on her shoulders, gently. “I knew about this,” he said.

  “This what?”