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and rather menacing to the others, including his teacher—Mrs. Butterfield.”
Brother Fire sips his drink, nodding slightly, though the other man has his back turned and is pouring himself more of the vermouth.
“Sweet woman, Mrs. Butterfield. Nice girl. Lovely. In the old days I might’ve pined for her a little, you know? In the old days. Before I went pedophilic.”
“That’s no way to talk.”
“I tell you the kid’s grandfather had a stroke? A part of me was thrilled. Saw it as an opportunity. Think of it. I could step in and con-sole him. Christ.”
Brother Fire watches him sip the drink, and is silent.
“I’m sorry for that. Didn’t mean to— God—take the Lord’s name.”
There follows a rather long pause. Mr. Petit crosses the room, then seems to hesitate, looking into the glass. He goes back and pours some more, and puts another ice cube in it.
“I—I thought we might say a Rosary together,” the priest says.
“No, Father. That’s not you and me.”
Both men are silent. Petit rattles the ice in his glass, and then has another sip from his drink, sitting down and leaning back. The thickness of his lower legs makes him look weighted down, heavier than he is, probably. There’s a space between his pants cuff and the top of his dark socks, which shows hairless, milk-white flesh; it diminishes him in some undiscoverable way. The priest looks to the other side of the room and has the sense that he’s taking his eyes from a disgraceful revelation. The other man’s dignity seems oddly to have been stripped away in that moment. Petit mutters something indistinguishable.
“Excuse me?” Brother Fire says to him.
“You probably came over to see if I’ve given in to my temptation.”
He feels caught out. It takes him a moment to realize that the other man is merely talking from what he’s ingested of the alcohol. He says nothing.
“Well, I’m waiting to see that myself, Father. I’m keeping the poor kid at a distance he doesn’t understand.”
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Again, they’re silent.
Presently, Mr. Petit says, “This must be strange for you.”
“Not strange,” says the priest. “You aren’t alone, you know.”
“You think so?”
“I believe so.”
“An important distinction.”
They drink quietly for a space, neither of them looking at the other.
“When I was first teaching,” Petit says, “I knew a guy, maybe ten years older than I was. Nice guy—easygoing but a little sad all the time. You could just see it in him, see it in his eyes. Something brittle and hurt, a glassy something in the irises, like he’d already had a drink or two and it would be seven-thirty in the morning and you’d be drinking coffee with him and he’d be perfectly all right and cheerful, like anybody, you know, but there was something in his eyes. Something—
Well, I said. Sad. Forlorn. You couldn’t put your finger on it. And one day I was talking to him and in the back of my mind was the thought that I’d say something to him to get him to talk about himself a little. Because the thing I noticed was that he didn’t ever really talk about himself. He was one of those types who seems so interested in everyone else, nobody ever notices that he’s not really there as himself, not really telling anything. It’s all about whoever he’s with. And so this one day we were drinking whiskey and it was in a bar and the doors were closed, we had been with some others of us, everything just like you’d expect, you see, a bunch of coworkers out for a few drinks after a school function none of us wanted to go to, and because I’d had a couple of drinks I was about to ask him some question—something, anything to get him talking about himself. But before I could get it out, he swallows a big draft of whiskey, asks for another, and then starts telling me about his past—something so specific and so amazing that it explained everything about his sadness and his reticence, without his knowing it had done that. I don’t know why he chose that time to talk, it was probably the booze—although we’d had drinks before and it never happened—I don’t know why that time, or why, particularly, he chose me to talk to, but he did. He told me that when he was only six years old a friend of his father’s came to visit, a nice man that he knew, too, of course, and t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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always felt big and strong and happy to be in his company, this man, and so he wanted to impress him with how excited he was to see him.
So the man walks into the front door of the house, and this friend of mine, six years old, coming down the stairs in the front hall, completely happy and excited, and as I said wanting to impress him, comes halfway down the stairway and takes a leap into the man’s arms. Well, the man wasn’t ready for it, see. And so he falls back, tumbles backward from the force of it, and hits his head on the baseboard—and dies. You—you see what I’m telling you? This man I knew, when he was a perfectly innocent child, in pure enthusiasm and love, wishing only to show his excitement and his happiness, kills his father’s best friend. The friend dies without a word. Silence. The kid is on his chest, stunned by the fall and the sudden stop, and under him, perfectly still and silent forever, is this friend. Of course the boy’s father took him away from the scene and there was a lot of commotion, a lot of people arriving fast to occupy him. He remembered a—a crowd, a whole swirl of faces, and confusion and his father’s friend lying really still, awfully still, in the front hallway of that house, and they all—all the adults, the family, the aunts and uncles and grandparents and older cousins—well, they all kept at him and at him, trying to distract him and then trying, over the days and weeks, to keep him from understanding what he did, and of course he did understand it, without saying it out to anyone, and he had carried it all those years, and it never, ever went away very far, was always just under the stream of whatever he had for thoughts, ever. The—the hor-rific silence that opened out, God it must’ve been just dreadful, after this—you see?—this harmless-seeming little stupid tumble in the foyer of that house.”
“That’s such a terrible story,” says the priest.
“Yeah. Truly. But it’s the world, right? It’s fate. It’s a freak accident.
But, see, the guy—this guy, my friend—was never the same. Lost his boy’s exuberance forever. And the truth is, he was never the same with me after he told me about it. Matter of fact he got mean. I couldn’t do anything right. Nobody could. Nobody would have anything to do with him, before it was all over, you know? And when he took a job in Japan and went on his way everybody was real happy about it. Last I heard he 302
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was living on the street in New York. Somebody or other saw him lying in a doorway with bare blackened feet, and no shirt. Curled up, asleep.
Guy was a friend of mine, or as much of a friend as he could be, given who he was, and then this thing about him, this—this knowledge about him got between us, got between him and everybody else.”
“There could’ve been other things, too,” Brother Fire says. “Other causes.”
Petit considers this, sipping his drink. “That was the cause.”
“You never really know with people, though, do you?”
He looks at the old priest. “Hell, you do.”
Brother Fire is silent.
“Right? You hear everybody’s little dirty secrets, don’t you?”
“It’s not as clear as all that. Most of the time I don’t know who it is I’m talking to.”
“Isn’t this odd?” Petit says suddenly.
The priest is at sea.
Petit sighs, and there’s a kind of shudder at the end of it, as if he is fighting off the memory of what he has been telling. “Anyway. I figure that’s me. Not long from now, I’ll go over some line and it’ll all come apart. Everything. Nobody’ll ever hear of me again.”
“Despair is the sin you must try very hard not to allow yourself.”
; “‘Not, I’ll not, Carrion Comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.’”
“I know the poem,” says the priest. “Gerard Manley Hopkins. That’s a willful beauty, that poem. A fight, a struggle. And do you know that when he died, his last words were ‘I’m so happy, so happy.’ He won, you see. He won through it all.”
“Yeah. Well.” Petit drinks, then nods several times, as if recounting some list to himself. His lips move. A man nodding in prayer? “Why’d you come here, anyway, Father?”
“You asked me to come here.”
“Oh.” He swallows still more of the vermouth, then sits back against the soft cushions of the couch, cradling the glass on his stomach, staring at the ceiling. “I’ll tell you, it’s not fair. It’s too hard. Committing sins in your head. I mean, what if you can’t stop thinking about something, Father? What if it keeps turning in your mind like a little merry-go-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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round. Round and round and round. Like it did for my poor helpless accidental manslaughtering once-friend?”
“There are medicines for what you’re describing,” says the priest.
“That’s an obsessive-compulsive thing and there are medicines that can help you, now. People that can help you.”
Petit rattles the ice in his glass. “Prayer sure isn’t helping me.”
“You came to me, didn’t you?”
His voice, answering, is chillingly devoid of feeling. “Oh, yeah. That.
I did that.”
“Let’s say a Rosary together,” Brother Fire says.
“I’m sorry,” says Petit. “I’m facing the fact that I have to quit my job.”
“Come on. We’ll pray.”
“I don’t believe it anymore. Any of it.”
Brother Fire puts his drink down on the side table next to his chair.
“Son?”
“Do you really believe it?” Petit asks.
“Yes.”
“No doubts?”
“Of course I have doubts.”
“Do they turn in a little circle in your mind?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, they do. They do that indeed.”
“Do you take medicine?”
“I pray.”
“You do.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“That’s your answer.”
“You asked what I did for my doubts.”
“Prayer.”
“Yes.”
“Hasn’t helped, has it.” Mr. Petit sighs, and then laughs. And then they’re both laughing. It goes on. The priest senses that this is an admission of a kind that can do no good, yet he can’t keep from this silly chuckling now. It’s appalling. And it isn’t the drink, either; he’s had very little of the vermouth. He looks across at the other man in his tre-304
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mendous unhappiness, this man who is laughing hard, mouth open in an aghast expression, the laugh going up to the ceiling, and he decides to try suggesting that they take a walk—simply get out into the air.
But, of course, it’s raining buckets outside now, and they can do no such thing.
When, at last, the jag has ceased, they face each other. “A laugh is the saving thing,” Brother Fire tells him, not quite believing his own words for having seen that look of open-mouthed horror on the other’s face. “Don’t you think?”
“Oh, try not to be pompous now,” Petit says.
The older man feels justly chastened, but he had only been trying to point something out—trying to help, give solace, lessen the ache.
Mr. Petit raises his glass. “Here’s to the laughs.”
Now they are strangely awkward with each other. A few minutes of stumbling talk leaves them finally without much else to do or remark on. Brother Fire writes down the number of the psychologist. Mr. Petit thanks him, folds the paper, and puts it in a compartment of his wallet.
They sit for a while longer and try talking about the late thunderstorm and the nightfall, always a bad time for Mr. Petit, all his life.
“I used to take a drink at that time, just to level the uproar.”
“What was the uproar?” asks the priest.
“Hell,” Petit says. And then seems to think about the word that he has just said. “Yeah. Exactly that. Hell. Me.”
“But you never despaired, really.”
He shrugs. “That comes and goes, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think true despair does that. True despair sits down on the soul, perches there like a fat dark bird and won’t unperch.”
“That’s an ugly image.”
For some reason, they laugh again. But it’s past the ease that had come to them earlier; it’s almost sorrowful now, and neither man can look at the other.
“Well, I’ve had some—uh, fly-bys,” Mr. Petit says. “Yes, fly-bys, let us say then, from the—the bird.”
“I know the feeling.”
“That’s comforting. Silly as it sounds.”
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Brother Fire stands. “Call that number for me?”
“I’ll do that.”
At the door, they wait a little for the rain to let up, and then Mr.
Petit walks him out to his car. They shake hands. Brother Fire pats his shoulder and gets in.
“Thank you,” Mr. Petit says.
6.
The disaster is upon him, Butterfield thinks. Shostakovich and wife are pouring the last of the champagne, talking about a fine Spanish red they have at their house. “I’ve got a headache,” Elizabeth says.
“You get a lot of them, huh,” says Ariana.
“I’ve got one now.”
Ariana sidles past Butterfield, holding her champagne glass lightly, with two fingers, the little finger raised, the wrist bent just enough to suggest a kind of coquetry, and says to him, “How come you’re not in a party mood tonight, sugar.”
“Ariana, stop acting like a whore,” Shostakovich says, but with a kind of merry smile, a proud smirk, really.
“I wanna dance, Daddy. Dance with me,” she says.
So, they mince together and begin dancing in the middle of the living-room floor. Ariana’s wildly enthusiastic, gliding against her husband, frenetic, playing to him, thrusting her pelvis at him. “What the fuck,” he says. “I’m tipsy, darling.”
Ariana takes him by the shoulders. Butterfield sees Elizabeth staring at him, and so he asks her if she wants to dance.
“Not just now,” Elizabeth says evenly. “No.”
Ariana’s behaving exactly like someone trying to make a third party jealous. And Butterfield understands that this isn’t lost on Elizabeth, who seems to be putting everything together in her mind, looking at him, brooding. Ariana throws a kiss at him, leaning back in Shostakovich’s arms, saying, “Why don’t you dance, Mr. Man. You’ve got some-306
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body to dance with.” Then she swings, letting her hair fly, and pulls her husband into another bending kiss. Because there’s no music, you can hear the straining sounds they make in the room. It’s far worse than last night; it’s psychotic and scary. The Butterfields are, for the moment, fixed in a kind of flabbergasted, fright-stilled wonderment at it.
“Jesus Christ, honey,” Shostakovich says. “At least put some music on.”
Elizabeth actually does so, with a robotic motion, her face a complete blank, as devoid of nuance as a flat white sky.
Butterfield can’t take another second of this. He steps out the front door for some clear air. He’s having trouble breathing. There’s a little wood-smoke-smelling breeze in the chill. The rain has at last moved off, and one side of the sky is gorgeous, washed, moon-bright, starry. He experiences no pleasure in it at all.
Elizabeth comes out and stands before him.
“They’ll miss us,” he says.
And she slaps him, hard, across the face. “I’m leaving you,” she says.
“And you know why, too.” The
n she just waits for him to respond, eyes narrow and tearful, hands on her hips, mouth drawn down at a peril-ously unattractive angle. It’s a face full of hurt and anger, and he can’t look at it. And, what’s worse, he now finds—in the instant of trying to think of how to save anything of what his life has been with this lovely young woman—that he can’t answer her at all, has nothing whatever to say. The power of this realization makes him begin to cry. She says, “Oh, Jesus Christ,” and goes back into the house, without closing the door.
He stands there crying, while the music plays behind him. There’s a little span of time, how much he can’t guess, that goes by, while the pair in the living room keep dancing, and he remains unable to do anything but sob and sniffle. Elizabeth has gone wherever she is in the house.
Shostakovich and wife continue to dance insanely, in their oblivious-ness, in the living room.
In the next moment—a further process of disaster—Fiona’s little red car pulls up. The Crazies get out. Fiona leads the way, march-ing across the lawn, followed close behind by his mother. No doubt, they’re arguing about something and want him to settle it. This would be comical if it were not so depleting. If he were not feeling the weight t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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of his whole life collapsing around him. He tries to wipe his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt, and then he sniffles, pulling his arm across the lower part of his face, like a child at the end of a tantrum; he sobs like that and is astonished by the sound, a grown man blubbering on his porch, to music.
“What happened?” Fiona says. “Is Elizabeth all right?” She looks past him at the living room. “Who the hell are they?”
“Tell me the news, Fiona.”
“There’s no news. We haven’t seen you for a couple of days.” She moves to the door and then opens it and steps partway into the house.
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