by Pete Nelson
He sat on the steps of his front porch after his run to cool down.
“Be glad you’re a virgin,” he told Stella.
“I’m a virgin?” she said.
“You are.”
“I never had sex?”
“I don’t think so,” Paul said. “When you were younger, you went into heat once and I tied you up outside a drugstore, and I turned my back for twenty seconds and I came out and there was a little black mutt, like a schipperke, who was … um …”
“Who was what?”
“Striving mightily,” Paul said. “But I think he was too short.”
“Too short for what?”
“Too short to reach.”
“Too short to reach what?”
“His goals,” Paul said.
“What were his goals?”
“He wanted to have puppies,” Paul said.
“With me?”
“Yup.”
“He didn’t even know me.”
“He didn’t care.”
“Well, that seems rather inappropriate.”
“You’ve been hanging around humans too long,” Paul said.
“Were you too short to have children with Karen?” Stella asked.
“I wouldn’t quite put it that way,” Paul said. “But that was sort of the idea. At first. At the end, we were both glad we didn’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated,” Paul said. “It’s not like we made a conscious decision.”
“Is that why you stopped having sex?” Stella asked. “To avoid having kids?”
“Is that why?” Paul said. “I never thought of that, but maybe. There was so much else that was wrong. And Karen and I stopped talking about what was wrong. If you stop talking about it, you’re dead in the water.”
“Too bad,” Stella said.
“Fifty years ago, people put up with a lot more than they do now,” he told her. “If Karen and I had gotten in a time machine and gone back to 1934, we would have been happy. Maybe not happy, but we would have stayed together. People settled for a lot less back then.”
“Such as?”
“Like sex,” Paul said. “Back then, people met, they kissed once or twice, they got married, they had a ton of sex for a year or two, and then they tapered off because they were so tired from milking the cows and plowing the fields. Now people meet, they kiss, they have a ton of sex, and then they get married and the sex tapers off, just like it always did, same exact curve, but now they think, ‘Wow, we’re not having sex anymore — it must be because we got married.’ And then they get divorced.”
“But there’s no such thing as a time machine, right?”
“No such thing,” Paul said.
“If you had a time machine, where would you go? Forward or back?”
“That’s an excellent question,” Paul said. Would he go back to the day he met Karen? Six months ago, he might have thought so. Now, no. That was progress. “I don’t know. Maybe I’d go back to the night I skinny-dipped with Debbie Benson, but this time I’d bring along some mosquito repellent.”
“You know what I think you’d do if you had a time machine?” Stella said.
“What?”
“I think you’d just leave it in the box because it would be too much trouble to read the manual.”
“You’re probably right,” Paul said, lifting her up onto the front porch and setting her down. “They say you’re supposed to live in the moment.”
“As opposed to what?” Stella asked.
“As opposed to living in the past or in the future,” he said. She tilted her head. “Don’t look at me with that tone of voice. I’m not saying it makes sense. I’m just saying that’s what people do.”
“Do you?”
He tried to be Zen and not think about Tamsen on Nantucket. He tried to tell himself it was a good thing — that the more time she spent with Stephen, the sooner she’d reach a conclusion about him, possibly in Paul’s favor.
When he went to visit her in Providence, he’d hoped Tamsen would throw her arms around him upon his arrival and say, “It’s so good to see you. Nantucket sucked,” but instead she’d simply kissed him and said, “I missed you.” She’d invited him, the day before, to come meet with her book club, where he read poems by some of the poets he liked, and a few of his own. Afterward he and Tamsen and a few of the others from the book club, including her friend Caitlin, went for drinks at a place called the Wick-enden Street Café, where Sheila Clark’s trio was playing. Paul had bought Tamsen a couple of CDs he thought she’d like, a droll singer named Diana Krall and another named Eva Cassidy, who’d died young and was then rediscovered. Tamsen said she’d never heard such a beautiful voice. During a break, Sheila Clark invited Tamsen up to sing a song, but Tamsen adamantly declined despite the encouragement and cajoling of her friends.
In the car, Paul asked her, “So have you come out of the closet now about your singing lessons?”
“The closet’s exactly where I should be singing,” she said. “After I told you, I figured I had to tell Stephen, and after I told him, the cat was pretty much out of the bag.”
Paul didn’t say anything.
“I probably shouldn’t be saying this,” Tamsen said, “but do you know what Stephen did?”
“What?”
“He took me to a Céline Dion concert.”
“Oh, no,” Paul said, feeling more optimistic. “I’m so sorry.”
“It gets worse. For her encore, she brought up Michael Bolton for a special guest duet. They don’t have that much cheese in all of Wisconsin.”
“Well, he didn’t know,” Paul said.
“I know,” Tamsen said. “He meant well.”
“You should give him some CDs by people you like so he can learn to tell the difference,” Paul suggested.
“That’s the problem. I already had,” she said. “It’s all right. My heart will go on.”
He was feeling more comfortable by the time they got back to her place. He told her he had a friend in Boston named Murph who’d offered him tickets for a Red Sox–Yankees game, two weeks hence. “The guy knows everybody,” Paul said. “He used to be the mayor’s chauffeur. Now he drives a tour bus. You’d like him. I’ll bet they’re box seats. We could have sausage grinders on Lansdowne Street before the game.”
Tamsen didn’t answer at first.
“What’s wrong?” Paul said. “We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
“I’d love to go to Fenway Park with you,” she said. “Could we go some other time? I’ve got something that weekend.”
“Sure,” he said. “Why? What have you got?”
“I wasn’t sure how I was going to tell you this,” Tamsen said. “Maybe we should talk later.”
“About what?” he asked. “You can’t just say, ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this,’ and then leave it at that. I’m just going to fill in the blanks with something worse than whatever the reality is.”
“I suppose not,” she said. “I love you. You know that, right?”
“Why am I getting this gigantic uh-oh feeling?” he asked her.
“Stephen wants to take me to Paris,” she said. “His wife is taking the kids to California and he hasn’t had a real vacation for a long time …”
Paul felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach, though he tried not to let on. He actually wasn’t sure he could have filled in the blanks with anything worse.
“I thought you just went to Nantucket with him.”
“That was only a weekend. I’ve never been to Paris.”
He didn’t know what to say.
“I knew I shouldn’t have … ,” she began. “I’m not going to keep secrets from you.”
He tried going back to the part where she said she loved him, but it was hard to stay with that thought.
“When are you going?”
“The next day,” she said. “I mean, I could go to the game with you, but that’s the night I need to pack. Un
less I packed before …”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Two weeks,” she said. “I didn’t even use my vacation days last year.”
“I’m sure you’ll have a great time. Maybe Céline Dion will be performing at the Moulin Rouge,” Paul said.
“Paul …”
“This isn’t easy for me, you know,” he said. He was caving in, collapsing inside. How much was someone supposed to take? “I’ve tried really hard to pretend I don’t care. For all I know, maybe you should be with him. He’s probably better for you in all kinds of ways — ”
“Stop saying that,” she said. “I can decide what’s best for me. This whole situation isn’t easy for any of us.”
“I mean, where’ve we ever been?” Paul said. “Worcester.”
“That’s right,” Tamsen said. “And as I recall, we had a rather fine time in Worcester.”
Paul wanted to change the subject but couldn’t.
“Just tell me something,” he asked her. “Do you love me?”
“Yes, Paul. I love you. I just told you that.”
“Do you love Stephen?”
“Paul,” she said. “I don’t think we should be talking about this. You’re both — ”
“Different,” he said. “I know.”
She paused.
“Now that his divorce is final,” she said, “he thinks maybe we should start thinking about taking it to the next level.”
“Is that how he put it?” Paul asked. “It sounds like a video game.”
She didn’t respond.
“So how do you feel about that?” he asked her. “Taking it to the next level.”
“I think we need to talk about it. That’s what we’re going to Paris to figure out. I’m trying really hard to be honest about this. With both of you. I think it’ll be good for us to get away from all the distractions. I’m not telling you this to hurt you.”
“Why can’t you figure it out in Cranston?” Paul said. “Or Rehoboth? People figure stuff out in Rehoboth all the time. Rehoboth is a very good place to figure things out. I’ve been there. There’s absolutely nothing distracting in Rehoboth.”
Part of him didn’t want her to “figure it out.” As long as she didn’t, nothing would change. The status quo was hardly ideal, but it was better than change, if change was for the worse.
“Don’t worry about it,” she told him, but she seemed aware of how feeble her reassurance was. “You’re my Paul. You’re always going to be my Paul.”
She reached into her purse and dropped a small metallic blue and silver object on the coffee table, a cell phone.
“I had to get one for work,” she explained. “I’ll leave you the number if you need to call me, but I’m sure it won’t work in Europe. It only works here in large cities if I’m outdoors — the reception is terrible, but I might be able to check my voice mail.”
He’d resisted getting a cell phone, mostly because it was another expense he didn’t need, but he also thought of all the cool places he’d been and the people he’d met, looking for a pay phone. Sometimes he liked being out of reach. A cell phone was probably in his future, though, he knew.
She wrote her number on a piece of paper. He took it from her and thanked her.
He wondered if there was a way to salvage the situation. Nothing occurred to him. When she said she was tired and wanted to go to bed, he thought for a moment and decided he’d rather get in his car and drive home. It was late, but failing again in bed that night would be too much. He wanted to scream, punch a hole in the wall, beg her not to go — order her not to go — but if she was going to be in Paris thinking about him, he wanted the image that lingered to be a positive one. He told her he wasn’t pouting or trying to be dramatic. He just wanted to go home. He tried to smile.
“Have fun in Paris,” he said, rising to go. He turned around again when he’d reached the door. “You really do deserve to be happy. I mean it. That’s what I want for you.”
He wanted Stephen to choke on a croissant.
Thus when Paul’s friend Murph called to ask him if he was still interested in the Red Sox tickets, a Saturday afternoon game against the hated Yankees, starting at three to accommodate national television, Paul apologized and said he still wanted to go but couldn’t get a date to use the other ticket. Tamsen had told him, on the phone, that she didn’t like the way they’d left things and wanted to see him before she left. About what? Paul wondered. Did she need to break up with him before she went to Paris? She said she’d be driving up that night, though she’d have to leave early the next morning. Murph said he’d be Paul’s date, as long as Paul didn’t try to get him drunk and take advantage of him.
“When has anybody ever had to try to get you drunk?” Paul said.
“Point well made, my friend,” Murph said.
Paul hoped a Yankees-Sox game would take his mind off Tamsen’s going to Paris with Stephen. Murph told Paul to meet him at the will-call window. Paul arrived early and bought Tamsen a Red Sox cap at the souvenir shop across the street from the ballpark for her to wear on her trip. Paul hoped it would remind Stephen, every time he saw it (even in the photographs they looked at later), of Tamsen’s split loyalties — assuming she wasn’t driving up to give him bad news. He kept the receipt, on the chance that he would need to return the hat. Murph was a corpulent man with white hair and a florid face. He looked something like Tip O’Neill would have looked if he’d let himself go. The seats were incredible, boxes seven rows from the field, just to the third-base side behind home plate. Paul thanked his friend and asked him how much he owed him.
“Tut-tut,” Murph said with a thick Back Bay accent. “Your money’s no good here. You want a beer?”
Paul nodded. Murph made his way to the concessions area, and when he returned, he was carrying a tray containing four beers and a gigantic box of Cracker Jacks. “I get the prize in the Cracker Jacks,” he said, handing Paul the tray.
“Jesus, Murph,” Paul said. “I thought not even the pope could buy four beers at a time in Fenway Park.” The strict limit was two per customer.
Paul drank his beers, and when they were gone, Murph went and got four more, commenting that he suspected management watered down the beer so that the fans didn’t get too hammered, especially during Yankees games. With the sun on his face, Paul closed his eyes and enjoyed the buzz in the air, the gentle, rolling purr of the crowd, the smell of fresh-cut grass, and the spicy aromas of bratwurst and Italian sausages emanating from the grills beyond the Fenway confines. He loved the famous Green Monster, the forty-foot wall in left field, not because of the unique dimensions it gave the park, or the odd caroms it created when balls bounced off it, or the way it forced opposing coaches to alter their strategies. He loved it because of how it kept the city out and made you feel as if you were watching the game inside a fortress. Murph kept the beers coming, particularly after Paul told him the woman he’d been seeing was going to Paris with her other boyfriend.
“But I must warn you,” Murph said. “I have only one rule, and that is that one does not discuss girlfriends or wives at Fenway. If we must discuss such things, I know a pub in Jamaica Plain we can go to after the game where the barmaids make the girls at Hooters look like the Bulgarian Women’s Choir.”
The Red Sox lost the game in the eleventh inning when one of the Yankees’ third-string utility players — it was always a goddamn third-string utility player — hit a home run in the top of the inning.
Paul begged off joining Murph at the pub, explaining that he had to get back. He’d switched from beer to Diet Cokes at the seventh-inning stretch, aware that he would be driving home on the MassPike, where state troopers patrolled for impaired drivers, particularly after sporting events. Traffic was slow out of downtown Boston but picked up by the time he reached Newton. Yet he found himself unable to drive much faster than fifty, even after traffic cleared, because he could not shake the feeling that he was driving to his doom, in which case there was no
hurry.
Why else would Tamsen be driving up to see him before her trip, if not to break up with him or part ways, however she defined it? Yes, it was possible that she simply wanted to see him. If that was true, it could wait, but if she had something else to say to him, something important they had to talk about, well … that could really wait.
He pulled off the interstate at a rest stop in Framingham to think. He sat in his car, thinking. He looked at his watch. Thinking wasn’t working. It was approaching eight o’clock, the sun sinking low in the western sky. He didn’t want her to come visit, but what could he say to stop her? Whatever it was, he would have to think of it in the next fifteen minutes or so if he wanted to catch her before she left her house, given the time she’d said he could expect her.
He finally went inside the rest stop, shouldered his way through the lines of travelers waiting to order their food at the McDonald’s, and found a pay phone on the wall between the men’s and women’s bathrooms. He didn’t know what he was going to say, but he told himself honesty was the best policy. As her phone rang, he watched a truck driver playing a video game called Road Rage. Getting it out of his system, one hoped.
When he heard her answering machine, he hung up, fished the piece of paper she’d given him from his back pocket, and dialed the number to her cell phone. The ring sounded like any other phone he’d ever dialed. He noted, as it rang, that every single person working behind the counter at the McDonald’s was morbidly obese.
Perhaps because he was thus distracted (he later excused himself), when her voice mail announced itself, he impulsively decided to go with the next best policy, which was dishonesty. He had to say something, or she’d worry. A white lie, he told himself, knowing even as he spoke that he was veering from white into somewhere between battleship and charcoal gray. He told her he’d stopped at a rest area on the way home, but when he got back to his car, it wouldn’t start, so now he had to deal with that. He told her he’d be fine, not to worry, but he couldn’t say exactly when he’d get back to Northampton. He said he hoped she hadn’t left Rhode Island yet and told her to have a great time in Paris.
