“No.”
“They made it twice, too.”
“I missed it both times.”
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“Well, I used to pretend that was me. When I was small and innocent.”
He sips the whiskey, and she goes to the other side of the bar, where a woman in a gray work shirt waits to pay a bar tab.
The bagpipe man starts out of the little side room, gets caught in the door with his unwieldy instrument, blows a couple of terrible notes, then gives up and goes back in and slams the door.
“He’s drunk,” Ariana says. “Poor bastard.”
“I never liked bagpipes,” says Butterfield, finishing his whiskey. She takes the glass and fills it again. He watches her. He can’t take his eyes from her. She comes back to where he is. When she remarks that he’ll be hungover for work in the morning, he tells her about running the bookstore, about being his own boss, and she gazes at him. “I do get up early, though,” he says. “My wife teaches school.”
“I’ve done a little of that, too.”
“What’d you teach?”
“Everything but science or math.” She laughs softly, shaking her head. Then she begins talking about the other places she has lived: Italy, for a year on a scholarship. She was an art history major, and then she was a student of Renaissance literature. She never finished college.
She met her husband. This year, she’ll turn thirty, and the idea has her thinking about starting over elsewhere.
All of this is offered in that confiding, nearly intimate way. It’s thrilling. There’s a deep, sensual, melodic something in her voice.
He orders a cup of coffee now, to offset the whiskey, which he can feel behind his eyes. She brings it, and then has to be busy again for a time, settling accounts with an older couple and with a man in a FedEx uniform. There are only three other people in the bar now, two men and a woman, all separate, all drinking beer. She comes back to Butterfield and asks, in that confabulatory way, if he likes living so close to mountains.
“I never thought about it,” he says. “But I guess I do, yes. It’s nice up there.”
“We came from Indiana to here,” she tells him. “Country flat as a table. And we lived in Mississippi, too. The delta. Renting. That’s us.
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Same thing. And in Delaware. And Arkansas. The same. Flat, flat, flat. I haven’t driven up into these mountains yet but I’m itching to.”
He drinks his coffee, staring as she closes down the cappuccino machine and takes the last of the night’s tabs. If he stays much longer, they’ll be alone. He looks at his watch—it’s almost two o’clock in the morning. Abruptly, he feels the need to get away—it’s almost the impulse to flee. He puts another twenty on the bar, and she sings at him from the other end, in that rich alto, “On the house, remember?”
“You’re sure?”
She doesn’t answer. The bagpipe man comes, sans bagpipe, from the side room, takes a seat at the bar and puts his head in his hands. She pours a cup of coffee and sets it before him. Butterfield waves at her and makes his way out. The temperature has dropped considerably now.
He gets into Fiona’s perfume-smelling car and then sits there, watching the entrance to Macbeth’s. Any minute, she’ll come from there and walk over to this car and get in. They’ll ride up into the mountains and find a meadow where it’s warm, and, under the starlight, they’ll answer the call of their blood. He sits there, entertaining this fantasy for a minute or two, and then he catches himself in it and is aghast. Breathing like a runner, he starts the car and drives out of the lot without looking back, willing himself not to look back where, in his mind, the beautiful Ariana comes out the door looking for him. He drives to Holly’s. The lights are out, but his mother opens the front door when he comes up on the porch. Behind her are plastic curtains, shards of wallboard, nails, the mess of work on the division of the house. He hands her the keys.
“You want me to take you home now?” she says. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I’ll walk.”
Holly steps out and, reaching for him, kisses him on the cheek. “Is something the matter? You were gone so long. Elizabeth’s worried.”
“I had a drink. I wanted to calm down. I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine.”
“If you want to ask me about this, I’ll tell you. If you want to tell me about it, I have nothing to say.”
She kisses him again. “It’s okay.”
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“Been a long night,” he manages.
“You know how Fiona is when she does this. She doesn’t mean any of it. She’ll be so contrite in the morning. And I’ll forgive her, I suppose.” Without waiting for a response, she murmurs good-night, enters the house, and closes the door. He turns and starts down the walk. The wind is really getting up now. It must be close to freezing. The leaves are flying from the trees, fluttering high in the streetlight.
Elizabeth has gone to bed. The lights are off in the bedroom. He stands in the kitchen and eats a granola bar and drinks a glass of milk.
There’s a singular kind of aloneness loose in him, a forlorn sense of having failed at something for which he has no name. Elizabeth comes to stand in the doorway. Her eyes are not accustomed to the light and she squints at him.
“Don’t be mad at me,” he says. “I stayed and had a drink.”
“I’m so mad at them,” she tells him, “I can’t tell you.”
He drinks the milk. On the wall of the kitchen, there’s a woodcut of an Indian on a horse, a gift from his mother. He stares at it.
“I’m not mad at you,” Elizabeth says.
4.
Brother Fire lies still in bed, hearing the house settle into the hours of the night and also marking the little creaking sounds made by Father McFadden, who is moving around in his room. The old priest knows that if he makes a sound, Father McFadden will come out and want to talk or show poems. How sweet it would’ve been if he had remembered to take the Aquinas with him upstairs instead of putting it back into the bookcase in the living room this afternoon. He has had such solace from the pages, turning them, savoring the stately progression of reason. The stairs will protest with his weight on the way down; he’ll be discovered. It’s failure of a kind, not to give the other man the benefit of the doubt, and there’s a guilty sense of having judged him. But Brother Fire can’t bear the thought of any more poems, or any more of the other 146
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man’s sincere exuberance. It fatigues him, makes him feel vaguely un-charitable. Father McFadden’s very presence these days makes the old priest feel mean.
Reaching over for his bedside telephone, he dials the number again.
Somewhere in him is the conviction that Mr. Petit’s trouble is a window out of his own lived life. Yet he doesn’t feel spiritually dry or dull. He can still pray, with enough effort. The Lord hasn’t abandoned him entirely. It’s just that something else has come in, some new element of his being, some hitherto sleeping gene that has awakened in him and made him an avid watcher of everything. No matter how hard he prays or tries to concentrate on the words of his prayers, this element of watching is always there, always attending to everything with mortal concentration.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Petit. I know you said not to call—”
“Father?”
“Is everything all right?”
“No, Father. It is not all right. Nothing is all right.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“It didn’t help, Father. I thought divine grace was supposed to help.
Nothing helps.”
“Pray with me, Son.”
“You don’t understand, Father.”
“Pray with me.”
“Who do we pray to?”
“Mr. Petit,” the priest begins. But the line clicks. He hears
this and says the name again, waits, and when the dial tone starts, he redials the number. He does this four or five times in the course of the night. The line is busy the first few times. When it rings, he has a moment’s anticipation, but it goes on ringing.
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5.
In the predawn, the Butterfields rise together, simply find that they are both awake and in no need of her alarm. She turns it off, then sighs and stretches. “Morning,” she says, as if she’s reporting a result. All night they’ve gone in and out of sleep, and her migraine persisted. He rubbed her shoulders again and talked about Fiona’s amazing ability to draw people into arguments with her. Through it all, he felt as if he were lying, since he couldn’t think about Fiona or Holly but only about last night’s strange minutes with Ariana. Finally, Elizabeth drifted off to sleep—dreaming, he hoped, of a life free of scenes and upsets.
Now the gray beginning of dawn comes through the window, and he says, “Hey.”
She says, “Hey, yourself.”
He makes coffee while she goes through some student work—a series of essays she has been putting off looking at. At one point, she says,
“Oh, listen. This is in response to a question about what they’ve been reading. Ready?”
“Ready,” he says.
She reads: “‘I devour books. I’m a bookworm. It’s hard to say who I like best but this summer I’ve been rereading one of my favorite authors, Epscot Fitzgerald.’” They laugh.
“Boy?” he says.
“Girl, this time. Arlene Gutterman. A sweetheart with a roll of baby fat and sad blue watery eyes.”
“She’ll grow up to be a CEO.”
“It’s so cute,” she says. “And then you think about it and it’s sad.
She’s the one who wrote the book report about Don Quixote and called him Donald all through it because it was a formal paper and she didn’t feel it was proper to call him Don. Remember?”
“Oh, yes,” Butterfield says. “I’ve told it around.”
“I hate so to embarrass the poor dear again. Maybe I’ll lose this one.”
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left the subject, thinking about Macbeth’s, and already wondering how he’ll get over there tonight. The realization of this upsets him, and he tries to shake it off. He’s standing at the living-room window, and he sees a truck and a small compact car pull up outside the empty house. A man and a woman get out of each, respectively. The sun is on the other side of the street, making shadows out of them. “Looky looky sugar cookie,” he says.
She comes to the window and puts her arm around his middle. “Do you think?” she says.
“Somebody finally bought it.”
“Should we go out and say something?”
The man and woman appear to be teasing each other, playing. There’s something about it that seems rather too personal to be interrupted. For a while, Butterfield and his wife watch them, then decide to let them alone for now. Elizabeth has to get to school, and Will has to open the bookstore. They go out together, and he turns and locks the door. The new neighbors are talking low, jostling one another. “Hey,” the man calls to them. “Hello.”
“Hello,” Elizabeth says and waves.
The woman waves back. Butterfield sees, with a shock, that it’s Ariana. She and her husband hesitate for a moment, and then decide to come over and introduce themselves. Everyone shakes hands. As it was last night, Butterfield can’t help staring. Ariana’s husband is talking. He’s Geoffrey Shostakovich, with a G, he emphasizes, and no relation to the great Russian composer. Are the Butterfields by any chance aware of the great Russian composer? Yes, Butterfield tells him. Quite so. Mr. Shostakovich goes on to point out that not many people are. He introduces his wife, Ariana Bromberg of the Kentucky Brombergs. Are the Butterfields aware of the Kentucky Brombergs? Well, no, Butterfield tells them. Geoffrey Shostakovich laughs and says that it would be an enormous surprise if they were, since the Kentucky Brombergs are a family of nonpracticing Jews who run a stereo store in Lexington, and no one’s ever heard of them, except Geoffrey Shostakovich and his wife.
His laughter is faintly forced-feeling, but his face reddens with it and the veins stand out on the side of his neck. The joke is apparently somet h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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thing Mrs. Shostakovich has heard repeated often enough to tire of it and to do a poor job of hiding her displeasure. She shakes her head and apologizes for Geoffrey’s stupidity. That’s the word she uses, turning to Elizabeth and asking if she might have a glass of water.
They all go into the house. Elizabeth wonders if orange juice would be more to Mrs. Shostakovich’s liking.
“No,” Ariana says with a definiteness. “I’ll have some water. And I go by Bromberg.”
“Of the Kentucky Brombergs,” Elizabeth says.
“Right.” Ariana’s black hair is combed so that it frames the sides of her dark face. She wears jeans and a muslin blouse open in front down to the curve of her breasts. Her husband is thick through the neck and jaws, and his eyes appear to bulge slightly; they’re a washed-out green-ish color, and they give him a look of permanent surprise.
Elizabeth pours the water, and, as Ariana takes it, Butterfield sees the softness of the backs of her hands. “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth says. “But we can’t really stay. I have to go—I’ve got a homeroom starting in fifteen minutes.”
“You teach?” Ariana asks.
“At the high school, yes.”
Geoffrey explains that he’s an architect, new with a firm in DC.
They’ve come here from Richmond, Indiana. A one-year lease on the next-door house. They never stay very long anywhere; they’re nomads.
Ariana has worked several kinds of clerical jobs, and is bartending now.
“Which basically means I’m unemployed in my field,” she says. She gives Butterfield a slight smile. The very smile.
He says, “You work at Macbeth’s.”
She nods. “I didn’t know whether to say.” When Elizabeth turns to her, smiling, she goes on: “Bartender’s confidence. Some men go to bars and their wives think they’re working late.”
“Not this man,” Elizabeth says. “So you were there for his crazy aunt Fiona.”
Ariana hesitates. “The old lady did seem a little awry, yes.”
“Ariana’s done some substitute teaching, too,” Geoffrey Shostakovich puts in as if to cover something. “Mostly high school, too.”
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“An awful job,” Ariana says.
“Oh, I like teaching,” Elizabeth tells her. “Most of the time, anyway.”
“I’m talking about substituting.”
“That is hard. But I do like the kids. I really have to go.”
Ariana gulps her water down. Her husband moves to the door, and she joins him there. “I bet you teach school, too,” he says to Butterfield.
“No,” Ariana says, and then stops. For a moment, everyone is at a loss. Ariana goes on. “I think your aunt—I believe she said you have a business?”
Butterfield tells Shostakovich about the bookstore. “Elizabeth’s my ride,” he goes on. “She drops me off.”
“I see that store when I head into work,” says Ariana. “It looks so cozy.”
“Well.”
Now it seems they’re all waiting for someone to do something. Perhaps half a minute goes by. At last, Elizabeth steps to where Ariana stands in the doorway, and says, “Gotta go.”
“I’m sorry we kept you,” Ariana says. “Really.”
“No, it’s fine. As long as we leave now.”
“Can we take you out to dinner with us this evening?” Geoffrey asks.
They still haven’t moved from the door.
“We have plans,” Elizabeth says in the same instant that Butterfield says, “Sure.
”
Again, there’s a pause.
Butterfield glances at Elizabeth, then feels constrained to offer an explanation: “I never get the dates right.”
“I’m sorry. Remember, Will? Holly and Fiona are coming over tonight.”
“Oh.”
“Well, tomorrow maybe?” Ariana says.
“Okay. I really have to—” Elizabeth makes a gesture of frustration, hands going up to the sides of her head and back down.
Shostakovich and his wife go out and turn, and are still in the way.
Elizabeth skirts around them, excusing herself, and moves to the car.
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The sun is just above the line of low hills to the east, on the other side of the car. The lights from it catch the strands of her brown hair as she hurries across the lawn.
“Sorry,” says Butterfield, closing and locking the door. He quickly shakes Geoffrey’s hand. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
“Thanks. Tomorrow then?”
“Don’t let my husband railroad you. He likes to think that’s charming, don’t you, Geoff.”
“Did you hear something?” Geoff says to Butterfield. “Could’ve sworn I heard something. A crow, maybe.”
Ariana stands with arms folded, as if waiting for Butterfield’s response.
“Moving’s tough on everybody, I know,” he says.
She says, “You’re a very considerate gentleman,” and she smiles—
that same direct, just-between-you-and-me expression.
“Your wife’s going to be late,” Shostakovich says.
Butterfield hastens to the car and gets in. The new neighbors are standing on the front stoop, as if they’ll simply wait the rest of the day there. But then, as Elizabeth backs out and Butterfield waves, they start across to the empty house. Elizabeth pulls down the street and on, speeding a little. They come to the first light, and she stops with a little more of a jolt than is her habit.
“What was that all about?”
He gives her an uncomprehending look.
“I felt like you were—as if there was—what did you do last night?”
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