The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  One evening, just as he had started to compose in his head a letter, not of resignation but of resigned incompetence, she brought out twelve beers instead of two, six in each hand, swinging the cartons as she went.

  “What’s the occasion?” Will asked as they sat down.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just a nice afternoon. And everything looks pretty.”

  “Yes,” Will said. “It does.” Before they had even finished the first beer, she was kissing him. He was pretty sure she had a plan, that the beers were premeditated and part of a plan they didn’t need. He had been fucking her in his head for the past six weeks, in the shower at night, at two in the morning when he couldn’t go back to sleep without whacking off, in the morning when he woke up on his belly with his boner almost jacking up his pelvis. The real thing was more awkward and he was ambivalent about it, as it proceeded, in a way that he never was when he was just pretending. He kept kissing her and smiling, running his hands up and down her back and holding on to her neck. She wasn’t smiling. In fact, she looked like she was on some sort of mission, and there was something very no-nonsense about the way she tore his sweaty shirt up over his head.

  “Oh, you have a nice everything,” she said, exploring around in his pants.

  “Umm … yeah,” he said, and she finally smiled, and laughed, and it got a little less awkward. What came next came next. They both knew what to do, even Will, and it had been years since he had had sex with anyone outside of his imagination. Oh, he kept thinking, over and over, that’s what it feels like, while she sat on his lap and he pushed his hips up off the grass, sure he was about to launch her up into the tree, and when he turned her over and fucked her between the two roots. There was something about the angle they made, and the way his forehead, extended over her shoulder, pressed into the bark, and the way the tree seemed to be leaning over them, that made him feel a little like he was fucking the tree.

  It was only awkward again at the end, when he tried to pull out. She held on to his hips and said, “Don’t.” He kept pulling back and said, “But it’s rude,” and she said it again, “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” and amid the pulling and the pushing he suddenly couldn’t tell if she meant don’t cum in me or don’t not cum in me, and so he ended up doing it half in and half out of her, and between the two of them, and with all that and the spilt beer and the way the churning motion of their hips had flattened and torn up the grass, they made a lot of mud. “Holy shit,” Carolina said, but Will couldn’t speak.

  The next day the tree was in bloom.

  7

  The animals, Molly noticed, were behaving strangely. You weren’t supposed to see animals at all in nighttime city parks. She had learned that on a nature program once, some special on the secrets of the urban wilderness, full of infrared footage of normally invisible creatures bustling in the semicultivated hedgerows of Golden Gate Park. And she was sure that most of the animals she’d seen so far tonight should have been asleep anyway. Owls and raccoons were one thing, but normal squirrels did not leap about on their hind legs in the dark, and she was reasonably sure that the birds lined up in unusually precise rows of four and seven on the ground and in the trees, singing their hearts out, were not nightingales.

  She had been wandering for almost an hour, amazed at just how lost she was. She had been in the park before, always with Ryan. She had sat on a bench near the top of the hill, not reading the book in her lap, staring out at the northwest part of the city while Ryan sprinted vigorously up and down the narrow wooden stairs and the dirt paths below. It was a pretty extraordinary view. Ryan seemed a little obsessed with the park, but he loved every pretty place in the city and was always stopping with her in various places around town, standing behind her with his chin against her ear, lining up their heads so he could be sure that they were seeing the same thing. “We are so lucky to live here,” he would say, and she couldn’t disagree. They were lucky that the earth had conspired to heap up such startling beauty in one place, and they were lucky that it hadn’t all fallen apart yet in a geological catastrophe. But she felt more lucky to get to share it with him—standing with him in Duboce Park, a whole variety of dogs hurtling around their shins, she could look at the daytime moon rising over the Oakland Hills, and appreciate how lovely that was, and then turn and look at his face, and appreciate how lovely that was, and she mostly felt lucky just to be with him.

  Those times she waited for Ryan while he vaulted himself all over this park she had gotten a sense for how big it was. Most of the time she thought she could hear his heavy steps or catch his scent, and it never felt like he was very far away, even when she couldn’t see him. For all its contained wilderness, this park was really just a big backyard, but tonight it seemed different, bigger and deeper and darker, and full of animals, who were all having crises of identity. Here and there, over the past two years, Molly had had little episodes of unreality, echoes or flashbacks to the way she had felt when she found Ryan dead. That had been the most unreal moment of her life, or else the most real—his dead body was either the most densely real thing she had ever encountered, and so everything else in the world seemed unreal in comparison, or else it was the most unreal thing she had ever beheld, and it sent out warping rays of unreality into the world, past and future, making everything feel fake. For weeks after he died she had felt detached and uncertain whether anything she was experiencing was actually happening. That got better, but the feeling came back now and then, at completely random and inopportune times, when she was arranging flowers at the shop, or trying to chose a loaf of bread, or struggling with the BART ticket machine at the airport. The flowers never wept, the bread never talked, the BART machine never handed her a ticket that said, Who are you, that he did that? But it would not have surprised her if they did, because in those thankfully brief moments, she felt suspended in a place where absolutely anything could happen. So the dancing squirrels and the insomniac budgies (or whatever they were) made her wonder if she was on her way into a more final sort of breakdown, precipitated by an effort to get to a party she didn’t want to go to, for a date with a man in whom she had no interest.

  But just as she was getting ready to see a little Volkswagen full of clowned-up raccoons trundling down the path, she came across a very familiar-looking stairway. She climbed it, thinking how Ryan used to take the stairs two and three at a time. There were four and seven frogs lined up on the top two stairs—they stared at her unblinkingly as she stepped over them—but beyond them was the bench where she used to sit waiting for Ryan to finish his run. She ran for it and sat down.

  That’s better, she thought, and, as if on cue, the fog parted, and the city opened up before her. She recognized St. Ignatius, lit up brilliantly, and that made her feel nicely settled. Her eyes wandered to the blinking lights on the bridge and the sleeping-elephant silhouettes of the Marin Hills, then east to the Lower Haight and Alamo Square, and she imagined Ryan standing behind her and saying it again. We are so lucky to live here.

  Reminiscing was not the way to get over him, and it was exactly at odds with the mission of the evening to sit there on the bench and imagine herself in another day, holding her book unread in her lap and listening to her boyfriend throw himself all over the hill. She closed her eyes and imagined that when she opened them she would be in that day, that he would come up behind her and press his chin against her ear, that he would lean around to kiss her after she agreed that they were lucky to be together in this city, and then she would proceed to keep him from killing himself.

  Molly opened her eyes. The fog had closed in again. She couldn’t see anything beyond the eucalyptus trees just below her, and those seemed oddly to have gotten a bit taller while her eyes had been shut.

  “I’m the luckiest girl in the world,” she said.

  Molly met Ryan in the shop. He came in one day, just like Jordan Sasscock did a million years later. She had only recently quit school and had not been working very long at Root and Relish. Her reit
eration as a shopgirl was a lucky break, which came thanks to her friends Gus and Tyler, who knew the owner, Salome, a woman entirely at odds with her name, since she was a blocky lesbian unlikely ever to do the dance of the seven veils, unless the veils were named Anxiety, Insecurity, Depression, Petulance, Micromanagement, Persnickitiness, and Need. She was actually a pretty good person, underneath her cloud of neurotic exhaust, and that came through often enough to make her just exactly bearable.

  Arranging flowers and selling fancy knickknacks to the wellheeled felt like just the right thing to be doing, for now. She had dropped out of divinity school in Berkeley, after finally figuring out she never should have gone in the first place, the whole enterprise having been mostly a way to both please and enrage her parents, since she was studying to become a pastor but doing it in a Unitarian school where some people thought Jesus was a gay role model. She discovered during her first Field Education placement how terrible she was at pastoral care, though the idea of it—helping people with their problems by praying to gay Jesus and the Great Spirit and maybe a voodoo saint here or there—was most of what drew her to the profession. But she wasn’t good with death, and that was all she saw in her ill-starred chaplaincy internship. She had no experience with it. Her many brothers and sisters were all alive and in good health, as were her parents, though it was years since they had spoken to her, and her grandparents and great-grandparents were lasting into extreme old age. She had never lost a childhood friend, had never owned a hamster or a fish, and her childhood cat was twenty-five years old. She had no experience with death and had discovered, on that horrible job, that she wanted none. She had nothing remotely useful to say to people who were afraid of dying, and nothing that she’d read or learned in school seemed to matter in those close, stifling rooms in Oakland where some dessicated old person whispered small talk at her. “Why am I trying so hard to believe any of this?” she’d asked her advisor, a red-haired lady with an ageless face who relied heavily on literature to answer just that sort of hard question, and who’d countered Molly’s previous crises of faith with skillfully deployed Mary Oliver poems. But chaplaincy pushed Molly to such an extreme of nervous exhaustion and sadness that her advisor had no poem that could help her and finally suggested, when Molly failed to ask for one, that a break might be good for her. Molly was twenty-six years old, and it seemed to her that she could spend an eternity as a shopgirl at Root and Relish, where Salome suffered and shared her daily inconsequential agonies, but no one ever died and no one ever grieved except over the prices.

  Ryan broke a set of china cups. They were beautiful—Molly had had her sensibilities refined in the weeks she had been working at the shop—translucently thin and so light it was hard to be sure, with your eyes closed, that you were actually holding one. She had one at her bedside with a candle in it, and she made a habit of watching the light burn down in it every night before she went to bed, which was something Salome had said helped her when she was feeling generally awful and had no faith anymore that the beauties in her life would ever measure up to the horrors. That was the only time she ever hinted at what she knew from Gus and Tyler about Molly’s flight from graduate school, and it was followed immediately by a tirade that was both about how Molly would never even know bone china from porcelain, and how Salome’s sister was still trying to make Salome look bad in their mother’s eyes, even though the woman had been dead for a year and it required a medium to communicate the slander. But Molly thought it was about the nicest thing someone who expressed affection through china could have said.

  The display, a Christmas tree of tiny cups, came tumbling down, and Ryan turned this way and that, trying to catch them. Molly had noticed him when he came in, because she was supposed to notice everyone and greet them—it helped to keep them from stealing things—but she didn’t really remark him, or notice that he was remarkable, until she saw him in the midst of the collapsing display, catching a cup but then breaking it when he caught another. She learned in those first few seconds that she really looked at him that he had a lovely face, that he had big hairy forearms, that he was pretty nimble for someone who walked into displays of china, and that he was a quick thinker, since he managed to save three of the cups, with one balanced on his head and one in either hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” Molly said, though of course it wasn’t. Salome was in the back, inventorying her disappointments, but she came out at the crash, and failed so utterly to be gracious that Molly was embarrassed for her. Salome cried, which Molly might have found excusable if this had been a dinner-party accident and it had been her grandmother’s heirloom china that got destroyed, but it seemed like egregious behavior in a shopkeeper. She didn’t have to demand that he pay for what he had broken; he offered right away. But that didn’t stop her tears, and he kept buying things, accompanying her around the shop and listening with a sympathetic face when she turned the conversation to her sister’s personality disorder. Molly watched him as she swept little scattered china bits—he tried to help but Salome wouldn’t let him—looking down at the floor whenever he caught her eye. Salome rang him up herself, dry-eyed now, but Molly half expected her to start crying with joy at his truly grand total.

  “What a nice young man,” Salome said after he had left, and then said she was going to take a nap on the daybed that she kept in the back. She always said that big sales exhausted her, and Molly wondered if there wasn’t something postcoital for her about their aftermath. Molly was alone out front when Ryan came back, and had settled into her shopgirl pose, with her elbows on the counter and her chin in her hands, watching the traffic go by on Hayes Street and feeling quite detached from the things that probably ought to have been bothering her just then. Some days her experience of life felt like one big shrug, but there was something as much contented as uncaring in that figurative gesture. Still, when he came back in, she stood straight and threw her hands up and said, “Hey!” And then she blushed because she thought it must have looked like she just gave him a high-school cheer.

  “I actually meant to get flowers,” he said. “But I forgot.”

  “We have those,” she said, and then added, when he stared at her a little longer without speaking, “in abundance.” She showed him around the roses and the lilies and the daises. He nodded at everything she presented, and spoke very quietly when he said one or the other of them was pretty, as if he was afraid too much noise would draw Salome out again from the back. “How many do you need?” Molly asked him at last. She had been handing the flowers to him as they walked back and forth among the stock, and now he was holding a bunch big enough to completely obscure his face.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, so she handed him a few more roses and a few orchids and a single dendrobium. She had worked long enough at Root and Relish to recognize a hideous arrangement of flowers when she saw one, but when she offered to fix them up for him he said he could do it himself when he got home. “I’m just going to scatter them around,” he said. “A few in each room.”

  “Alrighty,” Molly said, wrapping up the stems. She handed them to him with a smile. You were always supposed to hand things over with a smile; that was one of Salome’s inviolable rules. The customers weren’t always right, and you were even allowed to insult them, provided you did it in a way that they probably wouldn’t understand as an insult, but you always, always, always had to smile at them. Molly had tried out the smile and the gesture at home and been reminded of rehearsing her band smile as a child, standing in a line with her sisters while her mother gave them feedback: Mary you are too stiff, Molly you are too loose, Malinda too much gum is showing, and Melissa don’t close your eyes when you smile. What was on her face was practiced at first, but when he smiled back her face shifted uncontrollably, and she thought he smiled a little wider and looser himself, and then she blushed, even before he asked her out. She said yes without a second thought, which always, in future reflection, whenever her depressive
nostalgic daydreaming led her back in time to the day they met, went to show what a different person she was back then, the sort who went out with strangers all the time, who took numbers from men in the laundromat and the grocery store and in line for the porta-potty at outdoor concerts. Even at her most burned out and frazzled, freshly on the run from her job and her family, she still hurled herself thrillingly and mostly unself-consciously into the adventure of getting to know somebody new, into the dinners and walks and conversations and the fucking, which all went to show, she ultimately decided, how much less ruined other people’s tragedy left you, compared to your own.

  They didn’t even wait until the end of the date to have sex. That was a first for Molly, but it felt like the right thing to do, and she didn’t worry at all about whether or not he was going to respect her later, or come back for a second date, though even before they had exchanged a dozen sentences, she knew she wanted to see him again. He came to her apartment in the Sunset and stood in her door with the giant haphazard bouquet of Root and Relish flowers in his hands. “Hi!” she said, and kissed him, meaning for it to be something really innocuous, a greeting less formal than but not really that much more intimate than a handshake. But she tripped over her threshold, and broke her fall against him with his lips. If she had been holding her head at a slightly different angle, it would have been a totally unsensual bonk, but there was something lucky in the way they were lined up. Huh, she thought, and she might have said it, too, as she pulled her head back but left the rest of her leaning against him.

  It seemed like very good fortune, to lean against him like that, and when they seemed to decide together that dinner could wait, and started making out there in her doorway, it seemed lucky to her, too, for their desire to align as perfectly as their lips had, and for a collision that might have been disastrous to be a wonder, instead. She kept thinking, Oh, that’s nice and How fortunate, when she discovered how meaty the high part of his chest was or how soft the hair was under his arms. That’s lovely, she thought, as he started to heat up and put off an odor like warm bread and warm grass. By the time he came it smelled like someone had just mowed a lawn in her bedroom, but lovelier and stranger than that was the sense she had, as they rolled and humped and pressed their faces all over each other, of how nicely they fit together, however they combined. She had always been a little incredulous, back in college biology, that all the vital chemicals and enzymes that kept us alive and thriving just happened to run into one another all the time in exactly the way they needed to. Absent the Directing Intelligence, in which she no longer really believed, it seemed too good to be true. Suddenly it was easy to believe that two bodies could come together and together and together, over and over again from the dawn of time to the end of time, with barely a misstep. It wasn’t the first time she had had really good sex, but it felt that night that there was as much an abundance of luck in her bed as an abundance of pleasure. Later she would always feel the luck as much as the love between them—it felt like the universe had showered good fortune on her in his person, and she felt luckier and luckier and luckier to be with him, until her luck was suddenly exhausted.