After This

by Alice McDermott

  The girl was pretty enough, petite. She said something about wanting to be an artist as well as a kindergarten teacher. When Ralph returned, he slapped Michael on the back and said, I owe you, man. The scent of the pot they’d smoked was on him and Caroline took a bar stool in the corner and drank another beer, her hair still mussed in the back and her lips kind of blurred. Her friends seemed to stay away from her, but Ralph walked to that end of the bar every chance he got and leaned there next to her, watching the crowd, playing with her hair, not saying much.

  Michael left with the short-haired girl. She was from Commack. In his room they smoked a joint and listened to Pink Floyd and then he showed her some glow-in-the-dark chalk he’d bought for his class. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it yet, he told her, he just thought it would get their attention. Later, with all the lights out, she stood naked on his bed and drew all over the wall—pretty good drawings, he thought, some of them fairly obscene. He told her she was going to make one hell of a kindergarten teacher and then pulled her down again and wrapped his legs around her—she couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds.

  When he finally took her home late Saturday afternoon, the sky was slung so low over the rusty city and everything looked so beat up and damp it seemed more like the end of winter, the beginning of mud season, than the height of fall. He went out for subs with some of his housemates and ended up at a Halloween party in one of the Main Street bars. Bean was there and at one point stumbled over to ask if Michael had a shovel in his car. He was wearing a girl’s hoop earring and a bandanna. A pirate, Michael supposed, digging for treasure. “This is upstate New York,” he said. “Everybody has a shovel in his car.” Bean asked if he could borrow it and Michael asked if he was snowed in. They both glanced through the crowd to the orange light of the plate-glass window, to the brown and desolate street. “No,” Bean said. “I’m not snowed in.” “Then you can’t have it,” Michael told him.

  After last call, he went by Damien’s. He went in the back way—a set of wooden steps beside the garbage cans. This door was always open. It led to a small screened porch and what had been the original kitchen, which now stank of wood grown moldy with spilled beer. There were still plenty of people inside. Ralph had an arrangement with the police that usually allowed him to serve all night as long as he flashed the lights at one and cleared the place of most of the younger kids, and then locked the front door and turned off his sign. Michael didn’t see the short-haired girl, Beverly was her name, but Caroline was there, behind the bar with a couple of girlfriends. Ralph was at a table playing chess. Michael had a beer and watched him for a while. Then he had another and played some pool. At one point, about ten of them did shots of schnapps, simultaneously, up and down the bar, laughing like this was the wackiest college stunt ever. When Michael finally left, Ralph was still at his game and Caroline was curled up in a corner under her own parka. The sky just beyond the ball field was beginning to lighten—nothing spectacular about it, just the darkness turning into a queasy kind of pink. He could see a couple of neighborhood dogs running together across the outfield, noses to the ground. He could hear some poor working stiff trying to get his car started in the cold.

  There was no food in the house on Sunday and there was no use bemoaning, yet again, this part of the state’s lack of decent delis and diners. Hungover, all any of the downstaters wanted was a chocolate egg cream and a buttered roll. But they drove over to campus anyway and paid three bucks for brunch in one of the dining halls. They watched the residents, mostly freshmen and sophomores, move around the table with their trays—some of them still joined to last night’s date, most of them stuck in same-sex groups of friends or roommates who also hadn’t scored. A girl walked by wearing torn fairy wings. Another had a tall striped hat. There was a subdued murmur throughout the room, the smell of steam-table scrambled eggs and burning toast and bins of bacon and beef bourguignonne. The staff had hung cardboard skeletons from the window of the dish room; one of them wore an apron and a hairnet. Michael noticed that most of the kids eating had wet hair and damp clothes, just out of the shower, and it made him think how young they looked, half formed. Outside, the campus, too, seemed sodden, the leaves gone from every tree but still lying in black heaps and scattered rags across the grass and along the walkways.

  Then a roll of laughter came from the far end of the room. And then, following one another at a run, three guys dressed as the Marx Brothers—Harpo, Groucho, Chico. They climbed over tables, sat in girls’ laps, chased one another, the whole routine. Groucho put his arms around one of the fat dish-room ladies and did the eyebrow thing. Harpo had his bicycle horn. Their costumes were excellent—theater majors, no doubt—and all their gestures dead-on. People began standing on their chairs to watch, some of them shouting jokes or bits of encouragement or merely caught up in the growing, crazed enthusiasm that made Michael think of his own students when some glorious distraction disrupted the day and sent them all to the windows—a sudden hailstorm, a screaming fire engine, the milk delivery truck backing itself into a basketball hoop on the playground.

  And then, out of the blue, a boy stood up from one of the tables and smacked a full plate of steaming eggs right into Groucho’s face. The impact floored the poor kid, sent his cigar flying. There was a moment’s pause in the general noise and Michael found himself listening for a moan of anger or resentment, but what he heard instead was only the silence of a change in the tide. Suddenly, someone else dove for Harpo and pulled off his wig. He saw it fly into the air, bouncing from hand to hand until somebody else slam-dunked it into the milk dispenser. Chico’s hat, too, was being passed around and when he appeared again among the crowd, he was hog-tied in his own plaid jacket and someone had squirted ketchup and mustard down his shirt. On the other side of the room, some girls were dancing around a dog pile of guys—one of them had Harpo’s horn and was squeezing it in short bursts, like a rising orgasm. Then Harpo scrambled free. He was naked from the waist down, cursing wildly. He ran for the door they’d come in through, hunched over, bare-assed and limping. Chico and Groucho followed, Groucho turning as he ran, the nose and mustache gone, the eggs still stuck to his shirt front and hair. He gave the room the finger and was gone.

  It took a few minutes for things to settle down. Someone else had the bicycle horn and blew it intermittently, another guy held up Harpo’s pants and underwear and danced them around a bit. But people were returning to their seats, finishing their coffee, picking up their trays. Michael turned to one of his housemates and said, “What the hell just happened?”

  He shrugged. Chris was a good guy. Stocky, already balding, laid-back, and funny. His father taught industrial arts in a Bronx high school and that’s what Chris wanted to do, too. Michael knew he’d be good at it. Everybody’s favorite teacher. Chris had made all the furniture in his room—bed, dresser, desk, bookcase, even the box he kept his dope in, intricately carved with vines and flowers, satyrs and nymphs.

  He was going to get married right after graduation and they had a running joke around the house about what his girlfriend had decided was going to be their wedding song: “Time in a Bottle.”

  Chris shrugged, his elbows on the table. “The world is full of assholes,” he said, nonplussed. “What are you going to do?” Michael could see him asking his students this very question for the next thirty years.

  At Damien’s that night, Michael scanned the room for the short-haired girl, not sure whether he was hoping to see her or not. There were a few people in costumes, mostly masks or crazy hats, nothing too ambitious. Some of the girls wore leotards under their parkas and little ears on their heads—black cats or bunny rabbits. The less shapely ones were kids in flannel pajamas or housewives in bathrobes, curlers in their hair. One kid—every year—in a thrift-store trench coat that he would part to reveal a piece of pink rubber hose glued to a square of brown carpet whenever he caught a girl’s eye.

  Ralph still didn’t have any decorations up, but there wa
s a plastic pumpkin filled with candy by the register and every once in a while he lifted it and tossed some candy into the crowd. When Caroline squeezed in beside Michael, she put her elbow on the bar and held out her hand. “Where’s mine?” she asked, coyly, but a little defiantly, too.

  Ralph looked her up and down, baring his teeth in that strange grin. “Where’s your costume?” he said. He held the candy away from her, eyeing the turtleneck and jeans beneath her parka. “You’ve got to have a costume to get a treat,” Ralph said slowly, as if explaining something he thought she already understood. She stared at him a second longer and then abruptly turned away. The ends of her long hair briefly clung to Michael’s arm and shoulder as she turned. Then Bean moved in. He was still wearing the earring and the bandanna. He’d be wearing them for the rest of the year.

  “Is he going upstairs?” he asked. He had put bits of black and gold paper over his teeth. “To get his nut?”

  Michael shrugged. But Bean was watching Ralph behind the bar and didn’t seem to notice. Then he leaned closer, elbowing Michael’s side as if he were the one with the attention problem. “Is he going upstairs tonight?” he asked from behind his hand. “With her?”

  Michael turned away from him—the bandanna was tight, digging into his eyebrows. He had a sudden recollection of Pauline’s big face, bearing down on him. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said, and Bean, still watching Ralph, said a breathless, “Fuck.”

  And then he took a drag from his bottle of beer and shouted, “Hey, Ralph.” The hoop earring swaying with the effort. “What’s this about ghosts? I hear you got ghosts. You can’t sleep at night cause of the ghosts.” He looked around, noted the attention his voice had drawn. “Or is it because you’re some kind of frigging vampire?”

  Ralph was handing beers over the bar to outstretched hands. When he finished, he walked down to where Bean stood. He touched the corner of his mouth, the drooping ends of his dark mustache. “You know, I never came down here when I was a kid,” he said softly. “There was an outside staircase we used. Straight to the second floor. I had it torn off when my folks moved south—it was a fucking death trap, it was so rotten. But when I was a kid, that’s how we went in and out. I never came in here. So I never really knew when the funeral parlor changed over to a bar. I mean, to a kid, it’s all the same. People are talking, somebody’s crying, somebody’s laughing. A fight breaks out. Every once in a while there’s this creepy silence and then everybody starts talking again. All the same. Still is.”

  He looked at them all. He seemed to be making an effort to stay interested in his own words. “I had no problem with it. Dead guys, drunks.” He shrugged to show his indifference. “All the same.”

  “No ghosts?” Bean said. “No ghosts keeping you up at night, like you said?”

  Ralph let his black eyes rest on Bean for a minute. And then he said, “Only you guys.” Michael laughed with the others. Then, as was his way, Ralph leaned forward, squinting through his own smoke. “I listen to you guys, when I’m upstairs,” he said. He had his hands on the bar, a cigarette burning in one of them. “You don’t sound any different from last year or the year before. Or ten years before. Or even when I was a kid trying to go to sleep upstairs and there was a stiff down here in the middle of it all. And next year it won’t sound any different either.”

  Bean straightened up at that, pulled himself back. “Fuck, I’m out of here next year,” he said. He looked around as if for corroboration, then pushed at the bandanna that had begun to slip over his eyelid. “I won’t even be here.”

  But Ralph only grinned, patiently. The long-suffering professor. “That’s what I’m telling you,” he said, straightening up. “It won’t matter.”

  He turned to toss his cigarette into the sink behind the bar, and Bean, his tongue still poking at his cheek, cried out sarcastically, “That’s one hell of a scary story, Ralph,” just as Caroline was squeezing herself between them. She had some of her girlfriends behind her and Michael heard them giggling and whispering, “Oh my God,” before he took in everything else. She squeezed up to the bar, smiling, her parka with its dirty fake fur closed up around her neck, and her hair, except for a few strands that rose and fell with static, tucked down inside it. She said one sharp, “Ralph,” as if she needed to get his attention. Michael looked down at her and then looked back over her shoulder. Her legs were bare from the hem of her parka to the tops of her construction boots. Michael looked back just in time to see her open her coat and say, “Lady Godiva.”

  Beside him, Bean said, “Mother of Mercy.” The bright orange lining of her parka set off her pale body like neon. Through the veil of her hair there were her small, conical breasts and the shadows of her nipples, the teardrop-shaped navel carved into her stomach, the tender fuzz of pubic hair. In the mirror above the bar he could see all around her a dozen pale, openmouthed faces, like seraphim and cherubim in parkas and half-assed Halloween costumes, surrounding a Madonna.

  Ralph bowed his head and moved his mustache from side to side, laughing. And then he reached into the plastic pumpkin and pulled out a Milky Way. He handed it to her. As she slipped the candy bar into her pocket, Ralph put his hand beneath her ear, lifting her hair as she stepped up on the bar rail to move toward him. Bean was now doing a backbend to see her lovely bare legs rising out of the muddy construction boots, her white, dimpled behind under the hem of the khaki parka, and if the low-grade moan that filled the air wasn’t from him, it was from half a dozen guys in the immediate vicinity, like a muffled howl.

  When they broke apart, Ralph casually pulled two beers from the cooler. “You mind?” he asked Michael, as if he were just running out to use the john. Michael said, “I don’t mind.” Caroline, meantime, had bowed her head and let her hair fall over her face. Ralph went around the bar, bottles in hand, and Caroline, now holding her coat tightly closed, turned to meet him.

  Because Bean was there Michael asked him if he wanted to help out, but he downed his beer and said he was already helping, he was on the decorating committee and did his own Groucho thing with his eyebrows under the bandanna, and then moved back into the crowd.

  Chris volunteered instead. He was wearing a sombrero and serape he’d brought home from last year’s spring break and he was repeating halfhearted lines from Cheech and Chong that cracked up a group of girls reaching for their beers. Michael had known Chris since freshman year and it had seemed to him since then that the bulk of his emotional effort had always gone into staying faithful to his girlfriend back in Yonkers. He wasn’t always good at it—there were too many opportunities in the dorms—and his every misstep was followed by hours of banging his head against the cinder-block walls. He hated himself, he loved his girlfriend. He wanted to be faithful. He wanted to get laid. He was breaking up with her. He was marrying her. Now that he was, finally, officially, engaged, he had adopted this jokey, old-fart way of dealing with the women at school. A class-clown kind of thing that struck Michael as terribly sad, the way he shook his shoulders and wiggled his broad backside under the serape, the way they laughed at him and then let their eyes skip over to somebody else.

  When Michael looked toward the door, he saw Beverly come in with her own crowd. She was wearing one of those plastic headbands with bobbing alien eyes. Then he heard the door in the back room slam open and a few seconds later Bean was backing a coffin into the bar. He was shouting “Move!” in his dumb-jock way and people were laughing. A couple of other guys were pallbearers and Terry held the far end, bumping it into the doorjamb, the jukebox, the edge of the pool table. Some people ran ahead to grab some chairs and place them in the middle of the room. It was a gray metallic coffin and at first Michael thought it was something they had made in shop. He even turned to Chris to say, “What’s this, an IA project?” But Chris shook his head. “None of those guys is industrial arts,” he said.

  Michael turned back as they were struggling to get the chairs under the thing. It wasn’t a gray coffin but black. It was the di
rt that made it seem paler.

  “They dug that fucking thing up,” Chris said into his ear.

  It was wild. Bean, the impresario in his earring and bandanna and long coat, made a big deal of opening the lid, then shutting it, then spinning around to ask, “You want to see? Who wants to see?”

  Terry was leaning against one of the tables, hugging himself and laughing. He might have been shivering.

  Finally, Bean snapped back the upper half of the lid—flashing white satin—girls screamed as the thing rocked on the chairs, threatening to topple, empty. Now a kind of relieved hysteria took over the room and people began coming to the bar, shaking their heads. Crazy ass, they were saying. Bean was saying he’d found the thing in the basement. He was telling everybody it was where Ralph “really sleeps.”

  Terry was white-faced, swaying a little, definitely trembling. With a sudden lurch, he headed toward the bathroom. Michael saw him touch the corner of the coffin as he passed by.

  Other people were touching it too, rubbing the dirt, playing with the lid. It had lent its own odor even to the smoky room, something earthy and sharply unnatural at the same time. Beverly came to the bar for a beer and as he handed it to her she said, “Do you think this is funny?” She was smiling a little, as if ready to agree whether Michael said yes or no. He said no, he didn’t think it was funny.

  She sipped her beer, looked at the thing over her shoulder. He still wasn’t sure he liked her eyebrows, or the super-short hair, but he liked her eyes and her throat and the shape of her head. He liked the lightness of her, on top of him. The stretch of her spine in the dark.