The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  “You really should go back, Estelle,” the man said.

  She let out a bitter laugh. “I think you gave up any right to tell me what to do, oh, I don’t know, seven or eight weeks ago. Isn’t that what it’s been, Barbara?”

  The girl gave the man a tentative look, biting her lower lip in clear discomfort.

  “This really isn’t a good time for this,” the man said.

  “I’m sorry to inconvenience you, Francis,” she said, drawing out the “s” of his name in a prolonged hiss. “Edward, this is Francis Mattingly and his ‘plus one.’ Francis and plus one, this is Mr. Everett.”

  “Estelle,” Frank said, touching her forearm. She flinched as if he had burned her.

  “Don’t put your hand on me. Ever again.”

  “Mr. Everest, maybe you can convince her—it’s her sister’s wedding.”

  “Leave him out of this.”

  “Look,” Frank said. “We’re leaving. We’re leaving and you can go in. That’s—”

  “I don’t think I told you this part of the story,” Estelle said to Edward Everett.

  “Really,” Frank said, dropping his voice to a near whisper, “you needn’t.”

  “Need, no. Want, yes. I think I neglected to tell you that I was engaged up until seven or eight weeks ago. What was it, Barbara? Seven or eight?”

  “I don’t—” Barbara said.

  “How could you come to this wedding?” Estelle said.

  “Jack is my—” Frank started to say.

  “I know who the fuck he is. I just didn’t think you would have the—” She let out a guttural scream, balled up her fist and struck Frank on his left shoulder. Then, suddenly, she was swinging wildly at him. One of her blows knocked the glasses off his nose and they flew across the lobby, landing several feet away, where a bellhop wheeling a luggage cart toward the registration desk ran over them, crushing them.

  “My God,” Frank said, his right hand flying to his face, feeling for the glasses that weren’t there any longer. “You’re crazy. I knew you were crazy.” At the registration desk, the hotel manager was squinting in their direction, reaching for a telephone.

  “Maybe we should …” Edward Everett said, certain the manager was calling the police. Estelle was weeping audibly now, standing in the middle of the lobby, her face buried in her hands, rocking back and forth where she stood. He should just walk away; she was no one to him, just a crazy woman who had attached herself to him an hour or so ago, someone whose last name he couldn’t even remember—some sort of bird, she’d said.

  Frank was hunched over his glasses, picking up the pieces, the bent and snapped frame, the larger shards of glass, putting them gingerly into the breast pocket of his suit jacket as if they were something he could mend if he was careful enough.

  The manager was crossing the lobby toward them, followed by a man in uniform.

  “Estelle, you should really go,” Edward Everett said.

  Estelle lowered her hands. Her face was blotchy from tears, her cheeks darkened with mascara. He should just leave her. He wasn’t part of their story. He didn’t even know what their story was. But he said, regretting it as he did, “Come on, Estelle.”

  He began making his way unsteadily toward the elevators, Estelle following him.

  “Damn it, Estelle,” Frank was saying. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Fuck you, Frank,” Estelle said. “Fuck you.”

  Incredibly, they made it to the elevators with no one stopping them. As they reached them, the nearest opened, the bell dinging, the green “up” signal lighting. They pushed their way amid the crowd of people waiting, just barely fitting into the car. As the doors closed, someone on the other side of the doors called out, “Hey!” One of Edward Everett’s crutches was caught in the doors and they began to slide open. He pulled it toward himself, losing his balance and stumbling back against the obese man in the Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

  “Watch it, man,” he said, giving Edward Everett a shove forward with his belly. But the doors shut. As they did, Edward Everett caught sight of the manager and a man in uniform. “Madam, madam,” the manager was saying.

  “Mademoiselle,” Estelle said quietly, but they were safe, on their way up to the eleventh floor, while in the lobby, no doubt, Frank was telling whoever would listen about how he had been assaulted and giving a description of Estelle and Edward Everett. It struck him that Frank had no idea what his last name was. Everest, he can hear Frank saying, Something like that, like the mountain. That was not him; it was someone else.

  Upstairs, he led Estelle to his room, where she went into the bathroom, closed and locked the door. Edward Everett, exhausted from the physical effort, slightly tipsy from the wine, dropped his crutches and fell back onto the bed. In the bathroom, Estelle had the sink faucet on all the way, the water splashing loudly into the basin. Despite that, he could hear her weeping.

  This is crazy, he thought. How had he ended up with a sobbing stranger in his bathroom? An even better question was, how would he get rid of her?

  He pushed himself from the bed and made his way to the closet, dragged out his suitcase and dropped it open onto the floor in front of the bureau in the room. He began packing. When he had moved into the hotel, he had tipped a bellboy to bring his bag up to his room, and he lived out of it until Julie arrived. “Tch,” she said when she saw that even his clean clothing was a mess, as he had kept it all in his suitcase, pulling it out when he needed it. She had unpacked it, phoned the main desk to ask for an iron and an ironing board. He’d had no idea he could do that: call and it would appear with a knock on the door. She carried his dirty clothing downstairs, where there was a Laundromat, then brought it back upstairs and ironed everything, hanging his shirts in the closet, folding his underwear and jeans and slacks and laying them neatly into the drawers of the bureau, and then balled up his socks by pairs. Telling him he needed more clothing, she had read the labels in his jeans and shirts, taken money he’d given her and gone to a department store, coming back with bags of shirts and slacks.

  But now he had to do it all himself and it was cumbersome. Finally, he supported himself on one crutch, pulled everything out of the closet and the bureau drawer and dumped it onto the floor beside the bed, hefted the suitcase onto the mattress and sat on the bed, stowing it all as best he could. When the suitcase was full, he had three pairs of slacks and four shirts that didn’t fit. He considered what to do: Repack? Leave them for the maid?

  The bathroom door clicked open and Estelle emerged. She had brushed her hair, washed her face, reapplied her makeup. She seemed composed, yet when he looked at her, she averted her eyes, as if she was embarrassed he was watching her.

  She sat in the overstuffed chair where he’d spent so many of his hours in the room during his pity parties—watching television or staring out the window.

  “Are you better?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said in a quiet voice. “Much.”

  He waited for her to offer some explanation or bit of gratitude for what he’d done—kept her company, rescued her from Frank—but she said nothing. She stared out the window, although it was full-on night now and she couldn’t possibly see much, save for pieces of buildings illuminated by streetlamps or the lights of the hotel on the far side of the park. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing, the fat nearly full moon framed almost squarely by his window.

  “I should finish my packing,” he said.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said.

  He reopened his suitcase, pulled out half of the clothing he’d stuffed into it and began folding each piece as neatly as possible and laying it into the suitcase.

  “Frank was my teacher,” Estelle said, squinting out the window as if she were trying to make out an object in the distance. “I went back to school when I was twenty-six. I wanted a—well, it doesn’t make any difference. I didn’t finish what I was studying. I met Frank. He was my professor in a seminar I took on Old English literature in my second
term. I was—now he just seems like a pretentious shit. I mean, a ponytail? Since when? It’s to impress that little tart.” She took in a breath and let it out slowly. “He was electric in the classroom. Do you know anything about literature?”

  “Not really,” he said; the last book he’d read was a Perry Mason mystery.

  “Well, this won’t mean anything to you—I don’t mean to offend you. I mean, it’s okay that you …” She laughed. “You’ve been so nice to me and here I am sounding like … What was it Agnew said? I’m an ‘effete intellectual snob.’ ”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “I remember sitting in class one day while he was giving a lecture on the Junius manuscript. It meant nothing to most of the people in the room. I mean, who reads Old English? No one was paying attention to him. One girl was knitting, another was addressing invitations to her wedding, but in front of the room, Frank was alive, talking about—but who the fuck cares? I was a silly girl. Hardly a girl. That was—how the fuck could I have been engaged to him for eleven years? Who is engaged for eleven years?”

  He realized she wasn’t really talking to him; he was just another human being who happened to be in the room as she rambled.

  “Do you want to fuck?” she said abruptly.

  “What?” he asked.

  She stood up from the chair beside the window and crossed the room toward the bed where he was sitting.

  “Fuck,” she said. She sat beside him and, after hesitating a moment, laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’re not married or anything, are you?”

  “No,” he said. Was his proposal that hung in the air between himself and Julie an “or anything”? He hadn’t talked to her in weeks. He imagined her in her apartment, reading, glancing expectantly at the telephone on the table beside her couch, a yellow princess phone that had a small chip in the receiver from a time Audrey had slammed it into its cradle when a boy she liked told her he didn’t want to see her anymore.

  Estelle slid closer to him on the bed until her hip rested against his. “I’m forty-one,” she said. “It seems old, I know. A girl in my high school got pregnant our freshman year and the baby she had would be your age now. You could be my son; I’m that old.” She began tracing an index finger lightly along the inside of his thigh. “But forty-one isn’t that old. You’ll find that out.”

  “You’re just angry,” he said. “That’s all. You don’t really want to do this.”

  “Maybe angry, yes,” she said. “But I want to do this.” She cupped her hand over his groin. “You do, too. We both need this.”

  Chapter Seven

  In the morning when he woke, she was snoring loudly, lying on her back, tangled in the top sheet, her right breast exposed, her left foot poking out from the bottom of the blanket. The light outside the window suggested it was perhaps six. He studied her. She was not an unattractive woman, despite the fact that she was a good deal older than he was. Her hair was disheveled and he could see now there were gray hairs among the red. On the underside of her bare breast was a dark mole the size of a pencil eraser. He gingerly pulled the sheet up so that it covered her and she startled but stayed asleep.

  Moving slowly, as much because of his cast as from a desire not to wake her, he got out of bed and dressed without showering. He was leaving at seven-thirty. If she was still asleep, he would write a note saying she could stay until checkout time. He wondered what she would do. Could she face her family after the scene last night? Was forty-one old enough that maybe how your mother and sister regarded you didn’t matter?

  He wondered what kind of life she had, where she lived. She had said something about Indiana, but that was where she lived when she was younger. He realized it had been two years or more since he’d slept with a woman he didn’t know well. When he was a younger ballplayer, and certain of his power, in life and over women, he often slept with girls whose names he didn’t know. They waited outside the ballparks, in the shadows away from the lamps that arced over the parking lots surrounding it, stepping into the light when the players began filing out of the locker room. He thought of them as a kind of sexual smorgasbord: tonight, maybe someone tall and thin; tomorrow, maybe a plump brunette. He never understood the attraction the women felt for him and his teammates, why baseball was such an aphrodisiac. At the level they were at when they rolled into Ottumwa, Zanesville, Parkersburg, they had no money to speak of. The boyfriends the girls forsook earned more fixing cars or running a separator at the dairy than Edward Everett and his teammates did; they were better prospects, more stable.

  Last night, they had knocked his suitcase and clothing off the bed, scattering it on the floor. He eased himself up, hopped to a wooden chair pushed up against the desk and pulled it out. Awkwardly, he moved it until it was beside the bed, sat down, opened the suitcase and began picking up his clothing, folding it as neatly as he could, pressing it into the suitcase. What didn’t fit, he would leave behind. It didn’t matter anymore.

  Someone knocked on the door. It was too early for the maid, wasn’t it? Maybe the manager had figured out who he was even though Frank had the wrong name.

  He pushed himself from the chair and, bracing himself on the wall, hopped to the door. The knock came again, five muffled ticks against the wood. “Coming,” he said in a voice he hoped was loud enough that whoever it was could hear but that wouldn’t wake Estelle. He glanced at her just as he reached the door to see if she was still sleeping. She was, muttering something he couldn’t make out. “Coming,” he said again.

  When he reached the door, he flicked the dead bolt and turned the knob, hopping backwards two or three steps to allow the door to swing inward.

  It was Julie. She stood in the hall, holding a small overnight case and a makeup kit. “I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I called you so many times and you didn’t—and I swore I wouldn’t come, wouldn’t call anymore, but—”

  “Ed?” Estelle said, her voice groggy. “Is someone …”

  Julie peered into the room. Estelle was sitting up in bed, uncovered, both her breasts bare now. “Oh, my God,” Julie said, stumbling back as if someone had struck her.

  “Is everything all right?” Estelle asked, gathering the top sheet, covering herself. Julie snatched up her cases and fled down the hall.

  “Julie,” Edward Everett said. He hobbled after her, bracing his hand against the wall for support, regretting he hadn’t gone back into the room for his crutches. At one point, his hand slipped on the wall and he came down hard on his bad leg. The pain was excruciating and he nearly crumpled to the floor from it, his eyes filling with tears, but he kept his balance and continued after her.

  She stood in the hall, waiting for an elevator, jabbing at the “down” button repeatedly, muttering “Come on, come on, come on.”

  “Julie?” he said when he reached her.

  “Don’t,” she said, not looking at him.

  “I can explain,” he said, although he had no clear notion of what had gone on. He laid a hand on her shoulder and she whirled around, swinging her makeup case at him, catching him on his cast and this time he did fall, landing hard on his healthy knee, crying out, reaching for a small decorative table that sat across from the elevators, holding a house telephone and a stack of See Montreal Now! brochures. The table gave under his weight, one of its legs cracking, the telephone clanging as it hit the floor, the brochures scattering.

  The “down” arrow lit and the signal dinged. Julie stepped toward the door, waiting for it to open.

  “Julie,” he said, pushing himself to stand.

  “Leave me alone.” The doors slid open. The elevator was crowded. A family of seven stood waiting, a mother, father and five young children, all holding suitcases. They squeezed together to allow Julie room to step onto the elevator. “I’m pregnant,” she said as the doors started to close. “I wasn’t going to tell you but—”

  The doors closed, swallowing her words. Through the crack between them, he watched the light in the shaft c
hange as the car descended. After a moment, he heard a muffled ding, signaling that the elevator was stopping at the floor below. He punched the “down” button, certain he would reach the lobby too late: she’d be gone by the time he got there. His knee throbbed and he could feel his pulse thrumming in his ears. That she could be pregnant had never occurred to him. She was on the pill, he was certain. Once while she was in Montreal, she’d taken the plastic disk of them out of her purse while they were in a restaurant, snapped it open, plucked one from its slot, popped it into her mouth and taken a swallow of water. “Baby-proofing,” she said, giving him a wink and then slipping them back into her purse, blushing, just as the waitress brought their plates of waffles and sausage.

  The other elevator arrived and he staggered onto it. A bellhop with a luggage cart nudged it toward the back of the elevator and the only other passenger, a withered woman who supported herself with a cane topped by a silver lion’s head, inched her way deeper into the car as well. When the doors slid closed and the elevator began to fall, she wobbled and put a bony hand onto his elbow to steady herself, giving him a small smile of gratitude.

  When he reached the lobby, he looked for Julie. A line of guests stood at the desk, keys and credit cards in hand. At the head of the queue, Estelle’s Frank leaned against the desk, holding his bill close to his face, squinting at it. Through the glass doors leading to the street, Edward Everett spotted Julie at the curb, beside a taxi, waiting while a tall man in a lime green leisure suit counted bills into the cabdriver’s hand. Edward Everett limped toward the doors, wincing with every step. He knew what he was doing might set his recovery back by weeks, but he was determined to catch her before the cab pulled away. Just as he reached the doors, the cabdriver took Julie’s luggage from her and laid it into the trunk as she got into the backseat.

  “Julie,” he called, pushing against the revolving door, struggling to find the strength to move it. She glanced back at him, pulled the cab door closed and settled into the seat. He hobbled outside. Walking was even more difficult now, as he was able to do little more than take a step with his left foot and then drag his right, weighted by the cast, after it. “Julie,” he said again. Getting into the driver’s seat, the cabdriver glanced back at him. He saw himself through the man’s eyes: he must seem mad, unshaven, in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, barefoot, his hair as wild as if he hadn’t combed it in weeks. “Wait a minute,” he said to the driver. The man looked uncertain and glanced at Julie; she didn’t move but he could hear her say, quietly, “Just go.” The driver gave Edward Everett a shrug and ducked his head, climbing into the car. Edward Everett had reached the cab by then. He bent, knocking on the window beside Julie. “Please,” he said to her.