The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  Lauren scrutinized the bill after they closed, holding it up with both hands to the fluorescent light and even touching a corner of it to her tongue before pronouncing it real.

  “She only tipped you like that because she wants to fuck you,” she said, when he proposed that they split it. “I don’t want any part of that. Fuck money is bad luck.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “She didn’t want to sleep with me.”

  “They all want to fuck you,” Lauren said, explaining as they cleaned up that she meant not just the poor little rich ladies of Winter Park but the whole adult world. She wasn’t any older than Will, and was almost as friendless at school, and her prospects weren’t any brighter than his—like him she was a junior with middling SAT scores and grades barely good enough to get into college at Gainesville—but she liked to lecture him at closing time. She thought he was naïve, and said all the time that he would come to a bad end if he didn’t do something about his optimism and trust in strangers.

  “I hate everybody,” he said.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “I hate everybody. You’re just a poseur.” She didn’t protest anymore, though, when he offered again to split the tip. With the rest of what was in the jar they each had seventy-eight dollars.

  He stole a pint of Cookie Galore for his mother before he locked the store. He might have paid for it if Lauren hadn’t talked her shit; he wanted to show her that he hated Thom and the way he strove for excellence in his ice cream and the way he took sprinkles as seriously as the plague. If there were a way to craft them individually, millimeter by millimeter, Will was sure Thom would do it. As it was he ran them through a colander several times a day to eliminate the clumps, saying every time, “No one wants their sprinkles to look like cat litter.”

  “I waited up for you,” Will’s mother said when he got home. It was hardly after ten, but she never finished drinking until after midnight. His father was flying a trip to San Diego and would be gone for two days because of the layover. She hadn’t eaten, so Will made her a sandwich and sat with her while she failed to eat it. “What do you suppose he’s up to?” she asked, because his father hadn’t answered when she called the hotel.

  “Probably out having a sandwich,” Will said, pushing her sandwich closer to her. “It’s dinnertime in San Diego.” His mother always accused his father of having all sorts of wild fun on his layovers: erotic massage from small-footed Asian ladies in San Francisco, Donkey Shows in Tijuana, and naked hottubbing with the stewardesses in Chicago. His father denied it all, and had confided to Will that he didn’t dare even go out to dinner with the crew most nights for fear of raising his mother’s jealous mistrust.

  “She ruins everything,” he’d said. “Even from three thousand miles away, she ruins everything.”

  “She really loves you,” Will had said, because his mother said that to Will, just as his father said the same thing during his own drunken complaints and confessions, and Will thought they loved each other more than they detested each other because it was the love that came out, in blubbering tears, in their very deepest drunks, and Will believed that people were most honest when they were most drunk.

  His mother dialed his father again on the cordless phone, letting it ring and ring for the course of half a cigarette, while her eyes got heavier and heavier until she closed them and seemed to be sleeping, with the phone still chirping mutedly at her cheek and the cigarette ash lengthening at her mouth. “Asshole,” she said finally, opening her eyes and hanging up and putting out her cigarette. “Why does he have to be such an asshole?” she asked Will directly, setting her face in a way that made her look as sad as she was angry. Will tried to reproduce it sometimes, staring in the mirror and raising his eyebrows while he frowned. When Sean caught him doing it once he told Will his face was going to get stuck that way if he wasn’t careful.

  “I don’t know,” Will said, though in fact he knew that the answer was the same to the question his father asked him, on equivalent nights, in the equivalent situation, “Why does she have to be such a horrible bitch?”

  “Then what good are you?” she asked, which wasn’t really an insult because it was what she always said when he answered that impossible question. “There was something I was going to tell you,” she said. She strained visibly, then relaxed back into her grimace. “Nope,” she said. “Now it’s gone.”

  “That’s all right,” Will said. “Tell me later.”

  “It’ll come,” she said. She wobbled when she stood, so he helped her into bed and stayed downstairs only long enough to make sure she didn’t light another cigarette and fall asleep with it. He took the Cookie Galore up to his room and lay in bed eating it with a big spoon and staring at his television, which was turned off, but he liked sometimes to imagine that he was watching his whole day again on the gray screen. He skipped right to the interesting part, and watched the lady hand him the hundred-dollar bill, and then watched her walk back to her Jaguar and drive it to her million-dollar home on the lake. She stood on the step to finish her ice cream, and wiped her mouth carefully before she went inside, and then he was too tired to imagine what it was like on the other side of the door. The Cookie Galore was all gone and he was too sleepy even to put the empty carton on his nightstand. He fell asleep with it tipped by his pillow.

  He woke up a few hours later, not realizing a noise had startled him out of sleep until he heard it again: someone was moving around downstairs. His mother almost never woke until morning, and he wondered if he had locked the front door. There wasn’t a lot of crime in the neighborhood, but his mother lived in terror of a home invasion whenever Will’s father was away; she had a handgun in her dresser, and she made Will keep a baseball bat underneath his bed. He fished the bat out and crept downstairs with it, thinking he would see his mother gazing confusedly into the fridge, but it wasn’t his mother sitting and smoking in her customary chair at the kitchen table. It was his brother, who was supposed to be far away, living a life that had nothing to do with any of them. “I’ve come to take you away,” he blurted out, when he saw Will looking at him.

  “Did you buy yourself something nice?” the lady asked when she came back again the next night. She mocked a few more flavors and then ordered another strawberry cone.

  “It went into the college fund,” Will said, which wasn’t true. When Sean heard about his tip he insisted on taking him shopping, so that day, before their mother woke up and before their father got home, before any of the evening’s arguments about what Sean was doing or not doing with his life had begun, the two of them took a walk up Park Avenue and went browsing in the fancy shops for something that cost seventy-five dollars. Just taking him shopping wasn’t what Sean had meant when he said he was going to take Will away, but he wouldn’t say anything more about it just yet. “I’ve got a plan,” he said, “but I’m still thinking of the right way to sell it to you.” He nodded his head slowly in the way that he had, moving it very slowly at first but then faster, as if he were convincing himself as he spoke. “Yeah, I shouldn’t even have mentioned it yet, but I was so excited to see you.” He gave Will a hug. That was uncharacteristic, so Will asked what was wrong with him. “Nothing!” he said. “Everything.” He led Will along by the wrist. Will pulled away and put his hands in his pockets, but followed his brother out of the house and down the street.

  Most of the town’s pretension was concentrated in five blocks that ran alongside a park full of magnolias and azaleas and monuments to William Flagler: the stores that clothed and jeweled the rich ladies, the fancy restaurants where lunch was served to them on artfully arranged plates, and the boutique hotel where they had the occasional assignation. Sean hated it all, and made fun of every store they entered, and everyone who worked in those stores, and yet he insisted that Will should get something nice for himself. “They never get you anything nice,” he said, meaning their parents. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “They got me a car,” Will said, though technic
ally they had only gotten him half a car—he had gotten the other half for himself out of years of savings.

  “That thing’s a piece of shit. Try this on.” They were in a fancy men’s store, a place where all the shirts had distinguished logos at the left breast. Will’s ice-cream-loving classmate shopped there, and came to school every day in a different pastel-colored shirt, which Will now saw cost sixty dollars, whether they were tent-sized or normal-sized. He pulled the shirt on over his T-shirt. Sean folded his arms and stared at him. “That’s gorgeous on you,” said a salesgirl hovering nearby.

  “It’s not quite right,” Sean said. “If you’re going to spend sixty bucks, it really needs to be perfect.” He said the same thing about six more shirts, about a pair of shoes three stores down, about a series of wallets, and five different colognes, and finally a pair of golf pants.

  “We’ve run out of nice stores,” Will said, because they’d come to the end of Park Avenue. Across the street there was a gas station and a muffler shop and then the Rollins College campus. “Mission not accomplished,” Will said. “Oh, well.” He hadn’t really wanted to spend the money anyway.

  “One more store,” Sean said, and crossed the street to the college campus. Will thought they might be going to the bookstore for a sweatshirt, which he was going to say was not a very luxurious item, but Sean kept going past the bookstore to a dorm on the lake. “They might be closed,” he said, but the door he was looking for was wide open. There was an exchange that Will didn’t totally follow—it involved some hugging and a complicated handshake and the two of them saying Dude! a few times, and then Sean was asking Will for his seventy-five dollars and exchanging it for a large bag of pot. The kid shook Will’s hand, like he had won something, and then Sean took him down to the college boathouse, where they sat under the dock near the edge of the water and got stoned. “I swear I wasn’t planning that,” Sean said. “I just thought of it all of a sudden. And I knew it wasn’t something you’d ever do for yourself.”

  “Thanks,” Will said.

  “You like it?” he asked.

  “It’s good,” Will said, though he wasn’t sure that he really knew how to judge whether it was good or not. Pot tasted the same to him regardless of how people exclaimed or apologized over the quality, and it all made him feel the same: quiet and sad and detached. They sat without speaking for a while, passing Sean’s pipe back and forth. Will tapped his toe at the edge of the water, which seemed to be coming farther up the sand, tiny wave by tiny wave. “Do lakes have tides?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Sean said. “A glass of water has a tide. How are you doing?”

  “What, with the pot?”

  “With everything. How are you doing? How have you been?”

  “I’m okay,” Will said.

  “Just okay?”

  “Okay does fine,” Will said. “How are you?”

  “I totally suck,” Sean said. “It’s complicated. But we don’t have to talk about that. I didn’t come here to shit all over you, little brother. I came here to take you away from all that.”

  “From what?”

  Sean opened his mouth as if to answer, but then he just shook his head. “From all the shit,” he said finally. “You don’t see it yet, and that’s the whole point. You should get away from it before you do.”

  “Where would I go?” Will asked, already feeling quiet and sad and detached from Sean’s mounting agitation.

  “Do you remember when you were like three and I read you this Richard Scarry book?”

  “Who’s Richard Scarry?”

  “You know. Busy world. Cats and worms and badgers. Except the badgers are anesthesiologists and lawyers.”

  “Sounds awesome,” Will said, closing his eyes.

  “There was this one story. The cat makes fudge and it gets completely out of hand. The fudge comes out of the oven like it’s alive. Like it’s the blob. It comes out of the windows and the doors and the cat is stuck on the roof with fudge seeping through the shingles around his paws and then the worm comes by in a little helicopter and saves him. You remember that?”

  “No,” Will said, but then he thought he could remember the tiny helicopter at least, a one-seater that held the slim body of the worm, and he remembered that the worm wore a single shoe.

  “It’s like that,” Sean said. “But you’re the cat, and I’m the worm, and it’s not fudge.”

  Will burst out laughing and couldn’t stop, thinking of cats smeared with shit, and worms in boots, and of Sean in that one-seater helicopter swooping around their house with his knees shoved up against his chest.

  “It’s not funny!” Sean said. “It’s not funny at all!” But he was laughing so hard he was crying.

  “I didn’t give it to you to waste on your college fund,” the lady said. She paid for the cone with a twenty and held out her hand for the change. “I don’t make the same mistake twice,” she said. That made him laugh, partly because he was still pretty stoned, but partly because he thought she must be kidding. “I should make you give it back,” she said, and then he thought she was genuinely angry at him, and for the next twelve customers or so he imagined the conversation he would have with Lauren as they closed about how crazy the lady was. But then she was there again in line. “I want another one,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said. “That last one wasn’t very big.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “You got a kiddy scoop. Those are small. That’s not enough for me. That’s not really enough for anybody.”

  “I want a tub,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Why would I joke?” She pointed at the chalkboard behind him advertising the price for the take-home tub. It was twenty-three dollars and ninety-five cents with tax. She put the nickel in the tip jar and stared at him when he heaved the tub on top of the counter. “I think I’m going to need a little help with that,” she said. He lifted it by the flared plastic handles near the lid, but still his hands were chilled and aching by the time he got to her car, a red Mercedes convertible. He dropped it in the back and a bit of frost fell off the side to land on the leather seat. He stared at it, not sure if he should try to pick it up, and when he turned to apologize to her she had moved much closer to where he was standing. He was sure she was going to try to kiss him, and while he didn’t pucker up, he got ready for it, lifting his head back and narrowing his eyes and doing something that felt necessary with his tongue, like getting it primed. She reached out swiftly, but only touched his ear, measuring the distance from his earlobe to the hole in his head with her forefinger and thumb. “Such big ears,” she said. “We should talk sometime.” Before she got in her car and drove away, she handed him a card and said, “You can call me whenever you want.”

  Will stood outside his house, home from work but not ready to go inside yet. It was lit up as if a holiday were being celebrated inside, but Will figured that was probably just because everyone was home, and they had spread out to every corner of the house, each of them trying to put a maximum distance between himself and the other two. He cocked his head and squinted at the house, imagining fudgy shit pouring from the windows and spouting from the chimney, but it wasn’t funny anymore. He still felt a little slow and sad from the pot, and he sat outside for a while in the backyard, turning the lady’s card over in his pocket, waiting for some of the window lights to go out, but they never did go out. He went inside.

  “There you are,” his mother said, patting the chair next to her. She had a story for him that was partly about his father and partly about her own father and partly about Sean, how all three of them had let her down in the same way. She kept saying how clear it was, like crystal or the water in the pool just after it had been cleaned, or like her vodka, which she held up for him, flat and still in the heavy round tumbler she drank from—like this, she said, but Will couldn’t make much sense of it. He nodded and drifted a little, wondering what the lady had for dinner instead o
f asking his mother if she had eaten. When she finally mentioned that she was hungry, he poured her a glass of milk.

  “I’m not hungry like that,” she said, so Will drank the milk while she explained that people needed more than food to thrive, and that what she was missing would be more nourishing than milk, when she finally got it. She was a very particular sort of drunk that night, one that Will was usually grateful for, because instead of complaining about how her husband didn’t love her or how he didn’t deserve her love, she talked brightly about her new plan for happiness, which was the same as her old plan for happiness, the one she conceived in hopeful tears on nights like this but then forgot in the following days. It involved travel and divorce. She would move away from Florida, back to Washington, D.C., which was a much more civilized place than Orlando or Winter Park, and was where her family abided. She would learn to be a sign language interpreter, or she would go back to being a real estate agent, or she would open a flower shop. And Will would live with her, in a room that she still described to him in the same terms she had used when he was five, but now the idea of having an observatory bubble in the roof, or a horse post at the end of his closet, or a hot tub in his bathroom, was only remotely appealing. She was being easy and happy, but it was harder for him to sit there tonight, for some reason, than when she raged in tears. When the milk was done Will put her to bed.

  He passed by the living room on the way to the stairs up to the second floor, and his father called out to him from the couch. “Hey, buddy.” He didn’t pat the couch next to him, but Will sat down next to him anyway. “I feel like I haven’t seen you for days,” he said.

  “I guess you haven’t,” Will said, and his father told him that he should come along on a trip sometime. It would be free for him to fly, after all, and he could probably even sit in the jump seat, if he wanted. Those trips never seemed to happen, and that had been a disappointment, when Will was ten and daydreamed of sitting in the jump seat or maybe even getting to fly the plane for a little while, if the engineer and copilot should be overcome with food poisoning and his father needed another hand at the controls. But now he had no particular interest in the jump seat, or flying, or San Diego, or going anywhere but to work and to school. “I don’t think I could miss work,” Will said.