“This could be the day that Sad Todd finally snaps,” Jack says, his voice conveying that unique mixture of sympathy and contempt they all feel for one another here.
“Someone should buy that man a coke habit,” Oliver says, nodding sadly.
It’s Sunday evening, and they are on their way out to have dinner and too many drinks at the Blitz, a rundown sports bar on Route 9 famous for its overstuffed burgers and its absurdly attractive waitresses. Sunday nights are particularly depressing; you either didn’t have your kids for the weekend and you feel lost and alone, or you had your kids and now they’re gone and you feel exhausted and inadequate. Either way, drinks and ogling are called for and, this being America, both are within walking distance. Jack, as usual, is overdressed, in a black blazer and dress shirt, taking his cues from whatever he last saw George Clooney wearing. Oliver is wearing inadvisable cargo pants and a baseball cap. Silver would like to think he falls somewhere in between, in jeans and a dark knit polo shirt, but next to Jack, he just fades into the background like a passing extra.
Out in the driveway, Jack and Oliver sit down at the edge of the fountain to smoke cigars, which is more complicated than it sounds. First, Oliver takes two tin tubes out off his shirt pocket and cracks the seals. Then Jack pulls out a little guillotine and studies the cigars, under Oliver’s watchful eye, making sure to circumcise them properly. All the while, Oliver prattles on about where he got these particular cigars, about their relative superiority to certain other cigar brands, about their overall relevance in the cigar world, if you will. This never fails to prompt Jack to tell one of his Best-Cigars-I-Ever-Smoked stories, complete with names, dates, and locations that mean nothing to anyone else, while Oliver lights up with the blue jet from his monogrammed butane lighter and Silver tears his hair out, going quietly insane with boredom.
Cigars are all the rage these days, on both sides of the marital divide. The married men smoke them to somehow feel less fenced in by their lives, the divorced men smoke them to stave off the encroaching desolation on sad Sunday evenings, and neither group can shut up about it. Because of a tossed salad of latent Freudian inadequacy issues, middle-aged men will perform fellatio on a clump of cured leaves and somehow feel more like men because of it, which, if nothing else, is a colossal triumph of marketing. And you would think that, phallic or not, a habit that involves plugging your mouth would be a quieter affair, but you would be wrong.
Great works are written and empires crumble in the time it takes for these two to finish with the cigar bullshit, so they are all still there in the driveway to witness the arrival of Sad Todd’s ex-wife, who pulls up in a silver minivan. She is a drab sliver of a woman, with paper-thin lips and the harried expression of someone who has long since resigned herself to being the only competent person on the planet. She inspects the twins while haranguing Todd at the same time.
Look at them! They’re a wreck! How can you let them out of your apartment like this? Is that powder on their faces? You gave them doughnuts? Did it occur to you to bathe them, even once in three days? Jesus Christ, Todd, I could leave them at a kennel and they’d be better cared for!
Sad Todd does not respond. He stands there with his head bowed, absorbing the abuse like a tree in a storm. When she finishes chewing him out, she shakes her head for a moment, then leans in and straightens his folded collar, and, to Silver’s great surprise, gives him a quick peck on the cheek before getting back into her minivan and driving off. Love, Silver thinks. The twins wave to their father from the back window of the van, and Sad Todd stands in the middle of the driveway, waving back absently until they turn a corner, his face twisted with a grief so raw that Silver has to look away.
* * *
He loved a girl named Megan Donahue. She had a tiny waist, feline eyes, and was a passionate vegetarian. They wrote each other long love letters, citing proofs from the lyrics of lesser-known rock bands, which they would slip into each other’s lockers. When she wore white turtleneck sweaters, the fuzzy kind, she looked like Christmas morning. They were seventeen, juniors in high school, both virgins, and she was the first person he said “I love you” to. Actually, what he said was, “I love you, too,” but that’s just semantics. They were doomed by the endocrine system. His hormones, which were doing all of the heavy lifting back then, would not be denied. She wanted to stay a virgin every bit as much as he didn’t. Or maybe he just wanted to enjoy a burger now and then without being made to feel like a murderer.
CHAPTER 11
Lily is wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt today, with shadows where the letters of her alma mater used to be ironed on. It’s the kind of sweatshirt she would have worn endlessly in those first years after college—maybe it belonged to a former boyfriend and for a while had retained his scent. Silver imagines her back then, sitting in a small apartment, listening to music that brought her back, and absently pulling at the ironed-on letters until they came loose and had to be pulled off. There’s a metaphor in there, he thinks. Maybe even a song. But it’s been years since he wrote a song, and he knows that his creative impulses have been worn down to just that, impulses. The idea of actually writing something now is so alien to him that he can’t remember what it even felt like when he could.
Lily sings songs about birds and bugs and rain and cars and John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. When the little kids sitting around her on the floor sing along, she closes her eyes and smiles, banging the strings of her guitar with the flat of her hand to generate percussion. When she hits the high notes, they buzz like static in his ear, his tinnitus deeply sensitive to the upper registers. This gig can’t pay very much at all, Silver thinks, watching, as always, from a safe distance. She either does it because she enjoys working with kids, or because she’s that broke, and while both scenarios are appealing to him, he hopes it’s the latter, because he doesn’t do well with nurturers. He could not say what it is he finds attractive about her—maybe it’s her coltish grace and her open expression, or maybe it’s the way her voice emanates from her, clear, thin, and waveringly melodic; he hears a sweetness in it that he thinks reflects her personality.
All of which is rendered completely moot by his utter inability to so much as make eye contact with her. He watches as she packs up her guitar, collects her check from one of the two hyperathletic lesbians who own the bookstore, and heads for the door. She will walk right past him, and their eyes will meet briefly, as always, before she dismisses him in much the same way he probably appears to dismiss her.
He has always been somewhat shy when it comes to approaching women. Alcohol helps, but they don’t tend to serve it in bookstores, and he doesn’t think a flask at three in the afternoon would do much to enhance whatever appeal he might still possess. He watches Lily stopping to thumb through a magazine on her way out, and he cannot come up with a thing to say, a single conversational gambit, that won’t feel like he is coming on to her. To approach a strange woman is to reveal your intentions before the first word has been spoken, and he has always found such transparency to be paralyzing.
He has been alone for so long now. He has nothing to lose, and everything to gain. She might be lonely too. He’s pretty sure she is, he can hear it in her singing. Maybe she’d welcome the conversation, the possibility of possibility. Maybe it would change both of their lives. The risk of a quick rejection should be insignificant in the face of all of that. But somehow, it isn’t. And as he watches her leave the bookstore, the bells on the door ringing as it swings shut, he decides it’s simply another facet of the same general malaise that has informed the countless wrong turns that have shaped his life.
CHAPTER 12
Casey’s Infiniti is white, with dark seats that fill the air with the smell of new leather. The drums and bass coming from her stereo are as smooth as the ride, and they throb softly beneath his skin, just like they should. It is a thing of beauty, this car of his daughter’s, and Silver tries not to think about the fact t
hat it was bought for her by the man who isn’t her father but who does a much better job of it.
The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don’t necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person. So, sitting there in her car, as the Japanese engine thrums along with more horsepower than any teenage girl could ever possibly need, his dark thoughts rise up and fan out before him at record speed.
He thinks about the fact that the lives of everyone close to him seem to improve dramatically once they leave him behind. Denise found herself a better husband, Casey a better father, Pat McReedy a better career. He is a stepping-stone to a better life. No, that would imply that he somehow helped. He is the nonessential ballast that you toss out of the plane to achieve flight.
* * *
He looks over at Casey, who is humming along lightly to the ridiculous, mechanical song on the radio. Fucking Auto-Tune. She still looks so young to him; too young to have been through what he and Denise put her through, too young for this $40,000 car, and too young to be driving to an abortion clinic with her poor excuse of a father riding shotgun, only because she loves her mother too much to involve her in this sad and tawdry business.
Early Intervention is in a corporate park off I-95, just a few miles north of Elmsbrook. Their sign, a simple “E.I.” set against a pink clover-shaped background, is discreet and strangely cheerful. Casey parks and they walk through a small outdoor plaza where corporate smokers have ritualistically gathered, greedily inhaling their first – and secondhand smoke.
“Do you like my car?”
“Sure. It’s a great car.”
“What? I said, ‘Did I lock the car?’”
“Oh. I don’t remember.”
She gives him a funny look. “Are you OK there, Silver?”
He wishes she would call him Dad.
“Sure.”
He doesn’t think he’s ever told her about the tinnitus. Right now it is ringing like a siren in his ears, wrapping her voice in a fuzzy static shell.
“You look a little . . . off.”
“I’m fine. I’m just having some ear issues.”
She looks at him for another moment, then jogs back across the plaza holding out her keychain until she is in range to lock it. As he watches her run, something in his chest catches, and with no preamble, a short, guttural sob bursts forth from his mouth. A random memory: It’s a snowy evening and Denise, Casey, and he are walking back from somewhere, he doesn’t remember where. Casey is running ahead, up the slope to the front door of the small Cape Cod they bought, somewhat impulsively, a few years earlier when Denise told him she was pregnant. Casey, two and a half feet high, lifts her knees like a soldier, marching around in the snow with unfettered delight. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she,” Denise says. He looks at Denise, her hair glittering in a crown of dissolving snowflakes, and in that moment he is more in love than he’s ever been; with this woman, with this little girl, with this family they’ve made. Casey’s tiny boot prints surround them, and as she squeals with delight, he thinks to himself, This is the most perfect moment I will ever know.
“Silver?”
She is back, smiling uncertainly at him.
“You sure this is what you want?” he says, not because he sees an alternative but because it just feels like the kind of thing that, in hindsight, you’ll need to know you said.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No.”
“I’m early enough that they can use the aspiration method, which is basically the equivalent of inducing a period. There’s no pain and no recovery. I won’t feel a thing.”
“OK.”
“And this will stay our little secret, right?”
“Right.”
He has to admit, it feels good to share a secret with her.
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For not telling me I’m an idiot for having unprotected sex.”
“I guess I thought that was obvious.”
She laughs. Neither of them has made a move toward the front door of the clinic yet.
“Have you had a lot of sex?” he says.
She is momentarily surprised by the question, but seems to welcome it. “This was my first time.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“How was it?”
She takes a long time to answer. “It was actually very lovely,” she says, and then bursts into tears.
* * *
There aren’t a lot of forms to fill out, since E.I. doesn’t take insurance. And Casey wouldn’t have used insurance anyway, since she wants no explanation of benefits showing up in Denise’s mailbox. The price of an early intervention turns out to be six hundred and twenty-eight dollars. He supposes a round number would seem equally odd. He’s brought the cash with him, reducing his checking account roughly by half and giving the whole enterprise a whiff of the illicit. After paying, he joins Casey in a small private waiting room furnished with two leather couches, a water cooler, and two end tables covered with pamphlets, all trying to put a happy face on the situation.
Casey grabs a pamphlet and reads aloud to him. “‘The entire procedure takes less than ten minutes. Cramping during the procedure is tolerable, and only lasts for a few minutes. There is no recovery period. Women leave the office ready to resume their everyday activities.’”
“Sounds great,” he says. “Why doesn’t everyone do it this way?”
“You have to be between five and ten weeks. After that, you have to go hard-core.”
They sit in companionable silence for a few moments. He leans back on the couch and closes his eyes, experiencing a sudden, crushing wave of unearned exhaustion.
“Can you tell me something?” Casey says.
“What?”
“Anything. Just talk to me until they’re ready.”
“I don’t know what to talk about.”
“Are you lonely?”
“Right now?”
“In general.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“A fuck buddy?”
“I did bring a woman home the other night.”
“Go, Silver. How was it?”
“She just wanted to be held.”
“Oh, well.”
“It’s OK. Sex isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be . . .”
“He said to his pregnant daughter in the waiting room of the abortion clinic.”
Silver smiles. Despite his best efforts, she has emerged as a bright, witty, beautiful, and largely well-adjusted kid. Sometimes when he is with her, the sense of what he’s lost is powerful enough to flatten his lungs, which may be why he’s been so bad about being around in the years since the divorce.
The room is too warm, even sitting right beneath the central air vent, and the ringing in his left ear has reached the point where it is starting to crackle like a fire. He holds his breath and presses his palms to his ears, emitting a low hum from deep in his throat to counteract the whine in his ears. After a few moments, the whine recedes and then, to his surprise, it fades altogether. Blessed silence explodes across his head.
“Dad!”
She called me Dad, he thinks.
He opens his eyes to find Casey standing over him, looking panicked.
“What’s wrong?” she says.
He opens his mouth to tell her he’s fine, just a little tired. He can feel the words forming in his throat, but nothing comes out. Casey disappears for a second then returns with a mi
ddle-aged woman in a white doctor’s coat.
“Mr. Silver?” she says. “Can you hear me?”
“Of course I can hear you,” he says, and moves to stand up. But nothing happens. He can’t feel his limbs, can’t move his lips, can’t make a sound. He closes his eyes for a second. He can’t get over how quiet it is in his head, no buzzing at all. He hasn’t heard silence like this in years. He wants to wrap it around himself like a blanket and weep with relief.
When he opens his eyes again, he’s in the hospital.
CHAPTER 13
If there’s a good thing about waking up in a hospital it’s that, even with your brain still flickering like a loose bulb, it takes only the faintest germ of lucidity to figure out where you are. The beep of the heart monitor, the smell of industrial disinfectant, the overly starched sheets, and your wife sitting in the chair beside you.
Ex-wife.
Right.
Denise is squinting into her magazine in much the same way she used to squint at him, peering into his workings like a mechanic trying to find the frayed wire, the loose connection responsible for his host of malfunctions. This sense memory of her habitual contempt serves as a toehold for his short-term memory, which doesn’t so much come back as reveal itself to have been there all along, temporarily camouflaged against the sandy texture of his brain.
Denise looks up from her magazine. “You’re up.”
She doesn’t look terribly concerned, which might be a good sign or might be because she doesn’t particularly give a shit either way. His death, at this point, wouldn’t have much in the way of ramifications for her. Or anyone else, really. This realization is enough to get him to close his eyes and try to reconnect with dreamless oblivion. He hears the high-pitched wail of dry hinges, and then footsteps.
One Last Thing Before I Go Page 5
