by Matt Dean
Chapter 7
Assessment: She lay in her own bed. Between the quilt and the duvet. Leland’s side, Leland’s pillow. Drool-dampened pillowcase.
Bra, panties, slip. One leg bare, the other covered to the knee in pantyhose and sweat. She’d started, at least, to undress.
The post of one earring jabbed her neck. She wondered where the other had gone and when or if she’d taken it off. Lifting her head, she removed the remaining earring and set it on the nightstand.
She stared at the alarm clock. The red digits doubled, smeared, resolved. 3:42.
Closing her eyes again, she kept still and wished vainly for sleep to return. But the worry had started—the vague worry that she’d overlooked something important or authored some irrevocable disaster. She might have forgotten to lock the door. She might have neglected to turn out the lights or close the refrigerator or put away the ice. She might have wandered away from her guests and passed out.
Her throat felt sticky. Her tongue tasted foul.
She needed a glass of water. Or just a sip.
Maybe a bite of cake.
No, not cake: When she imagined a smear of frosting coating her tongue, a clot of crumbs mashing against the roof her mouth, her stomach buckled. She spread her arms and legs, seeking the cool places in the bed. She sucked hard at the air.
She hadn’t tasted the cake, but she could at least say it had been beautiful. Three square tiers, the largest about a foot wide. Buttercream frosting, pastry cream filling. Cream cheese frosting was standard, but Anna Grace—remembering the way Leland, with the glisten of tears in his eyes, had described his father’s red velvet—had ordered buttercream and pastry cream. She should have saved it for him. She should have waited to watch his face as he cut into it and saw the thick crimson slabs filled with golden custard.
In a little while, if sleep didn’t come, she’d go downstairs and eat something. Not cake, but something. There were plenty of leftovers. The guests had barely eaten. They’d flipped from mood to mood like a crowd of manic-depressives—first knocking back drinks and cackling at their own jokes as if determined to make a wild time of it, then tilting their heads in pensive silence as if Pink Martini’s arrangement of “Que Sera, Sera” were the most sophisticated and perplexing composition in the history of music.
Early in the evening, Anna Grace had come into the kitchen to find Winston Haynes standing over the iPod, running his thumb around the wheel. “You know,” he said with a cluck of his tongue, “this kind of thing—” Sighing, he rolled his eyes toward the speakers—toward “Que Sera,” as it were. “It’s been done. This faux-retro, über-ironic, hipster bullshit. Done and done. And Karen Holmes is a lounge singer, by the way, not a jazz singer. You should tell Leland—” But at the mention of Leland’s name, his mouth snapped shut, as if he were afraid of summoning a demon.
Later, Kate Popyrin, usually so dour and stooped and cranky, told a long series of Soviet jokes. “On Red Square,” she said, playing up her accent, “drunken man with Stolichnaya bottle shouts for all to hear, ‘Brezhnev is ee-diot, Brezhnev is ee-diot.’ The KGB arrests him, nat-u-ral-ly. When trial comes, he is given fifteen years in gulag. ‘Five years,’ pronounces the People’s Judge, ‘for insulting esteemed General Secretary of Party. Ten years for divulging state secret.’” After the laughter tailed off, she launched another anekdoty: “Journalist from Pravda comes into hospital and says—” But no one ever learned what the journalist said. Kate turned as crimson as the cake and, clearing her throat, went to refresh her drink.
Michele Treat, who’d never struck Anna Grace as much of a reader, spent the whole evening with her face inches from Tim Warren’s, her hand on his forearm, urgently, urgently trying to convince him to read a series of books she’d been racing through—A World of Ice and Fire, was it? Or A Fire of Icy Worlds? An Icy World of Fire? “Every chapter has me on the edge of my seat,” she said in a whisper. “Just when I think things are calming down, somebody gets beheaded or run through with a sword. You just never know when a major character’s going to—to—” She seemed reluctant to finish her sentence, with Anna Grace in earshot, but in a small voice, eventually, she did: “Die. You never know when somebody’s going to die.”
All right, then, Anna Grace thought at last. We shouldn’t have had the party without him—without Leland. People would say so, wouldn’t they? They’d been thinking so already, whether they’d said it or not. But she’d needed it. That was her reason, if not her excuse: She’d needed it.
Her daily allotments—a single white wine at lunch, half a bottle of red wine rationed out into four half-servings at night—were never enough. If she over-served herself a single time, it would disrupt the whole system. It would mean pulling a cork every day rather than every other day. And that soft thwop every evening before dinner: Leland would hear, John Carter would hear, and if Corinne stopped by, she would hear. They’d catch on, if they hadn’t already. They’d see the pattern. If they hadn’t already.
It demanded real effort—maintaining an eye for volumes, a sensitivity to the weight of two-and-a-half ounces versus five. As the weeks passed, her cravings grew stronger—nearly intolerable, until she felt almost as if her skin were growing tighter, cinching in, threatening to burst open. And then, and then, the day of a party would come, and she’d pull one cork after another, a Symphonie Fantastique of thwops. She could fill and empty her glass over and over. Five ounces, six ounces, eight. She could effortlessly drink her way to the sweet spot, halfway between buzz and oblivion, when everything went slippery and soft, when reality itself seemed malleable and amenable. It must be how the tide felt, when the moon pulled it inland at last, and it could flood the shore.
Sleep wouldn’t come. The two hours of dreamless oblivion she’d already had were all she could expect for tonight. And she needed a glass of water.
With a grunt, she tossed away the covers. Sat up. Waited for the room to stop tilting.
A funny thing occurred to her: As a child, choking on the steel-plant smog of her hometown, gritting her teeth against the twangy, corny music her parents loved, she’d chosen to sing opera because it was the strangest career she could imagine. She couldn’t think of anything else that would take her so far, in so many senses of the word, from the pokey dead-end street in Youngstown where she’d grown up, from the two-story shotgun house with gray smut clinging to its asphalt siding, from the wood-paneled bedroom with no posters on the wall and no lock on the door. Even as a child of nine or ten, she’d thought the worst thing she could be was the spitting image of her mother and the apple of her daddy’s eye. But now here she was, aping both of them at once, drinking her wine the way her father used to drink his beer—daily and greedily—and yet stretching it out the way her mother used to conserve everything that came into her hands—ground chuck, or bits of fabric, or overgrown zucchini from the neighbor’s garden. It was a funny, funny thing—not that Anna Grace was laughing
Lying down, she’d felt steady, but when she stood, the floor seemed to lurch away from her feet. She stripped off her hose and bra and slip. Let them fall. Holding out her hands, groping her way through the feeble light, she crossed to the closet. She found a nightgown hanging on the door and put it on.
From the threshold of her bedroom, she peered across the hall. John Carter’s door stood open. She’d have to tread softly as she passed.
No. On second thought, no. He hadn’t come home. He was staying at Corinne’s.
Down the stairs. Careful on the treads. Hold the bannister.
She had turned out the lights. Good. At the bottom of the stairs, she crossed the entryway and checked the door. She’d locked it. Also good.
The kitchen was a wreck. Wine bottles, beer bottles, empty tumblers, stacked plates speckled with crumbs, napkins in bunches and wads. But the refrigerator and freezer were closed. No ice on the counters. No puddles on the floor. Good, good, good.
She found a basket of rolls and took a small bite of one.
Too dry, too salty. She tossed it into the trash can.
At the island she hefted all the bottles. Empty, empty, dregs, empty, dregs, empty. There were unopened bottles somewhere. She hoped so, anyway. And yes. Here was a screw-capped bottle of moscato. It opened with a snap as the seal broke. She rinsed a tumbler and filled it with wine.
Young or cheap or both: She could smell the grape skins. She took a sip. Tepid. Too sour and too sweet. Revolting. Her stomach boiled, but she drank half the glass. And then she set it down on the counter with a clunk. A few drops splattered the back of her hand.
For a moment, she thought everything was going to come back up—the bit of bread she’d just nibbled, a sandwich she’d eaten hours ago, and a lot of wine, both red and white—and yet she could do no more than clutch the edge of the island and clench her teeth and hope. The wave of nausea passed. She caught a whiff of the moscato and quickly turned her head.
Enough.
She’d come to the kitchen for water, her belly churning and her mouth gummy from the wine she’d already drunk, and then she’d immediately poured another glass. She needed help—whatever that meant. What did that mean?
Meetings. Her father had quit drinking in the nineties, and he’d done it by going to meetings. There were steps and prayers and—what? rap sessions?
No, not rap sessions. No one had rap sessions any more.
Group therapy, then. Support groupery. She pictured a lot of old men in Ban-Lon shirts, stout and unaffectionate men like her father, bluing the air of a room with cigarette smoke.
What could she do now, though, in the middle of the night? There’d be no sessions to rap in, no groups to get support from. She could call her father and ask him what to do—but no, that was unthinkable. She hadn’t asked anything of him since nineteen eighty-three—not even to pass the salt at the dinner table—and she wasn’t going to start now.
Maybe there was a hotline or a chatroom. If you could go online for full episodes of Californication and F Troop, why not for steps and prayers? Everything had moved into the virtual world, maybe the old men in Ban-Lon were there, too, each bluing his own private room with smoke.
The music room, the entryway, the dining room—all, as she moved through and past them, bore the marks of the party. A champagne flute here, a half-moon of sandwich there, a handful of smeared fingerprints on the piano. The piano bench stood open and empty, as if it had been ransacked for sheet music. Anna Grace had no memory of anybody playing. Jean-Marc Archambault usually, at some point in any given evening, slogged through his latest atonal sonata, but this time he’d only explained his latest sonata, and unlike the music itself, the explanation had made a great deal of sense.
Maybe someone had asked her to sing—or worse, maybe she’d insisted on singing. She hoped not. A couple of years before, after a poor performance of Kindertotenlieder, she’d called an end to all that. No more recitals, no more singing, period.
A poor performance? A humiliating performance. Thinking of it again now, she felt just as she had then. A wave of cold passed down the back of her neck. Her scalp prickled with heat. She wanted simultaneously to freeze and to flee.
Throughout the performance, her voice had been rough and shaky, and then she’d barely made it through the last song. One might even say she hadn’t made it through. Near the end, she’d choked on a sustained high note. It had taken her about three bars to recover, and she’d skipped an important phrase. In this storm, they rest as if in their mother’s house.
Did she drink because her career had ended so shamefully, or had her career ended so shamefully because she drank? She couldn’t quite get a lock on the order of things.
At the door of Leland’s study, she felt along the top of the doorframe until she found the key. She unlocked the door and went in. Leland’s MacBook sat in its usual place in the center of the desk. Rolling the chair across the plastic mat, taking a seat, Anna Grace opened the laptop. While the hard drive whirled to life, she rehearsed her web search.
AA, maybe. But no. If she used the acronym she’d get American Airlines, and she couldn’t bring herself to spell out that first A-word.
Find a meeting. No, there were millions of kinds of meetings in the world. She’d get ads for WebEx.
How to get sober. She shuddered. Sober: such a staid-sounding word.
When the screen lit up, she squinted and blinked and waited for her eyes to adjust.
A browser window was already open to a photograph of two men. Older and younger. Taller and shorter. Dark-haired and blond. They were both naked. The older man was standing. The younger man was kneeling. The older man had his hands in the younger man’s hair. The younger man was fellating the older man.
Anna Grace looked up at the window’s title bar. Daddies Love | Hot Dads Horny Sons Bi Married Straight Dudes Together. The skin at her temples tightened. She dug her fingers into her cheeks and forced her jaw to open.
What did she think about this? What did she feel? She had no context, no frame of reference. With the kind of elaborate, sluggish effort a dull child might make to sound out a difficult word, she thought it through.
Leland was gay.
For a long while, she stared at the wall. Her thoughts spun in circles. Her heartbeat whammed in her ears. She needed a goddamn drink.
Somewhere or other she’d read that an electron could be in two places at once. This was, as she understood it, the underlying principle of alternate reality. If an electron could be here and also there, then two mutually exclusive realities could exist simultaneously. Electrons could do whatever the hell they wanted, but the human heart could only be in one place at a time—she was sure of that. A man who lived a double life loved only one person—himself.
She got up and went back to the kitchen. The tumbler of moscato sat just where she’d left it. She drained it in one long gulp. It was terrible stuff, really terrible—too young, too weak, and too warm. She opened the freezer drawer and crouched down and dug around inside it. Under a bag of frozen artichoke hearts, she found a half-full bottle of Absolut Citron. She filled the tumbler with ice and then with vodka. One hearty swallow. A shard of frozen glass in her throat. A pool of cold lava in her belly.
Standing with her bare legs in the light and chill of the open freezer, she drank more. Half the glass. She felt steadier by the sip.
After topping off the glass with more vodka, she added a splash of the moscato. For sweetness. Why not? She tasted it. Not disgusting. A new invention. Presenting to the world: The Moscatini.
She returned to the study and sat at the desk. Took a sip of her drink. Set down the glass. An ooze of moisture spread across the polished wood.
She clicked the browser’s back button. Another pair of men—older, younger, standing, kneeling, sucking, receiving. Back. A video: She clicked play, but the moaning was too much to bear—both too private and too stagy. Back. Back, back, back. Videos, photo sets, profiles. Men in pairs and trios, oral sex, anal sex, more anal sex. She paused on a photo of a man about Leland’s age. Shaved head, salt-and-pepper goatee. He had his head tipped back, his mouth open, his tongue extended. His eyes were closed as if in religious ecstasy.
Anna Grace wondered: Was Leland only virtually gay, a chatter and surfer and masturbator? Or had he put his mouth on another man? Maybe he played the hard-up husband, the man whose wife never got on her knees. He wouldn’t have to be Brando. No Method required.
She reached the head of the trail, the empty window where he’d started. You’ve turned on private browsing…
She should be angry, shouldn’t she? Her blood should be boiling. The vodka, though—the vodka was very cold. She took a big gulp of it, swished it around in her mouth, and swallowed. Very cold.
An idea came to her as if by stealth, forming gradually, with no conscious reasoning at all on her part. It was perhaps not a good idea. It was perhaps not perfectly ethical. But it made her feel positively light of heart.
If Leland ever accused her of drin
king too much, or challenged her to drink less, or in any way objected to the nightly thwop of a wine cork, then she could counter with this.
This. This. This meant the end of half-servings. This meant the end of rationing.
Carefully, taking pains not to disrupt the chain of Leland’s browser history, she clicked the forward button. When she’d reached the final page, she closed the laptop, used her sleeve to mop up the sweat of her glass, and backed out of the study. He would never know she’d been there.
The Last Wednesday in October
