by Tom Perrotta
“Good to see you,” he said, swirling the scotch around the inside of his glass with a practiced motion. He nodded toward the TV. “You been watching this?”
Dave shook his head. On the screen, a ragged band of German soldiers exited a bombed-out building, hands on top of their heads. Many of them were adolescent boys and gray-haired men. All of them looked bewildered.
“Quality stuff,” Mr. Müller declared. “Not like the garbage you see on the other channels.” He pronounced “garbage” as though it were a French word.
“My father's a big World War II buff,” said Dave. “He can't get over the fact that fifty years have gone by. He says it feels like yesterday.”
Mr. Müller nodded, still swirling his drink. “Half a century. Water under the bridge.”
They watched from the air as a load of bombs plummeted earthward, blossoming in a swath of destruction. The perspective shifted to the ground, where German women in winter clothing combed through the smoking rubble, glancing anxiously at the sky.
“So how's the wedding coming?” asked Mr. Müller.
“Okay. Getting there.”
It was, too. Most of the major decisions had been made. They'd booked a room at the Westview and hired Rockin’ Randy to handle the entertainment (Dave still hadn't told the Wishbones). Chicken cordon bleu and poached salmon had been selected as entrees. The invitations had been printed on off-white paper in gold lettering and would be mailed tomorrow. Julie had found a gown she was happy with; Dave would take the plunge in his Wishbones tux. Suitably hideous dresses were on order for the bridesmaids. All that remained to be nailed down was the honeymoon plan. They were debating whether to postpone the trip to Hawaii for a year or so, sparing their limited funds for the more practical purpose of furnishing their new apartment, the top half of a small two-family on Pine Avenue.
Mr. Müller chuckled. “It's all we ever talk about around here. Wedding, wedding, wedding. You'd think we were planning the Normandy invasion.”
“No kidding,” laughed Dave. “It's a lotta work.”
“I'll be glad when it's over.”
“Me too.”
“You nervous?”
“A little,” Dave admitted. “Were you?”
“When?”
“Your own wedding.”
Frowning, Mr. Müller consulted the ceiling.
“I can't remember. Probably not, though. I didn't have the brains to be nervous.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those were different times,” he explained with a shrug. “People didn't think so much about what they were doing. You had a few good dates with a girl, and the next thing you knew you were standing at the altar with a flower stuck in your coat. Dolores was a beautiful bride. That much I remember.”
Their attention returned to the screen. The documentary had arrived at the liberation of the concentration camps. As many times as he'd seen the pictures, Dave still wasn't prepared for them. The barbed wire and watchtowers. The gas chambers and ovens. The piles of confiscated shoes and eyeglasses, the trenches filled with broken, naked bodies. The half-dead faces of the survivors, many of them too weak and hungry to move.
“Man,” said Dave.
“Jesus H. Christ,” muttered Mr. Müller.
Abruptly, the subject shifted to the Pacific theater. A kamikaze airplane came spiraling out of the sky, crashing in a fireball on the deck of an American destroyer.
“So how are the folks?” Mr. Müller inquired. “Everybody healthy?”
Julie Came downstairs shortly before ten o'clock, just in time to watch the atomic bomb fall on Hiroshima, the slow-spreading cloud seeming oddly familiar on the small screen, almost beautiful. It reminded Dave of the feeling he had watching the Challenger disaster over and over again, how he'd forgotten about the people involved and allowed himself to appreciate the strange, arcing beauty of the explosion itself
Mr. Müller yawned and said it was time for him to turn in. Julie kissed him good night, taking possession of the remote as she did so. The TV snapped off before her father had even reached the base of the stairs. Dave and Julie remained frozen until Mr. Müller had completed his ascent.
“Sorry to leave you stranded,” she whispered, as soon as her father was safely upstairs. “My mother felt like talking.”
“No problem.”
She lay down on the couch, resting her head on his lap, peering up at him with a dreamy half smile. Even if he hadn't smelled her breath, he would have known from her expression that she'd been drinking.
“We polished off that whole bottle,” she said cheerfully. “That's a first for my mother and me.”
Dave moved his fingers through her thick, outspread hair. She'd worn it short for a couple of years, thinking she might look more like a teacher when she went on job interviews, but recently had decided to let it grow again. He loved the mass and sheen of it, the way it was always getting caught in their mouths when they kissed. He loved Gretchen's short hair too, which was right for her the way long hair was right for Julie. Somehow the contrasts made each of them more interesting, though that was the kind of secret he had to keep to himself.
“So what were you talking about?”
“Their marriage.”
“What about it?”
Julie's mouth puckered. A deep, horizontal groove appeared in her forehead.
“It's sad,” she said.
“What?”
“She says he never touches her anymore. Not for a long time now. It's like that part of him just disappeared.”
“Does she want him to?”
“She cried when she told me.”
Dave didn't know what to say. He stared at the blank TV, mindlessly stroking her cheek. He didn't know much about his own parents’ sex life, and preferred it that way. Julie rolled onto her side, her face resting lightly and intriguingly against his crotch.
“That's not going to happen to us, is it?”
“I hope not.”
“Don't let it.”
“I won't,” he said, understanding even as he spoke that his words meant nothing. There was no way of knowing what your life would look like thirty years down the road, no way of controlling your feelings.
“Don't let it,” she repeated, nuzzling him through his jeans. “I don't want it to turn out like that.”
“Okay,” he said, his eyes widening with surprise as she undid his pants and tugged gently on his zipper.
“We can do this for the rest of our lives,” she whispered, pulling down the waistband of his underpants. “Until the day we die.”
“Sounds good to me,” he agreed.
He was about to remind her of their chastity agreement, but decided not to. Everybody backslid now and then. There was no sense being a jerk about it. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the warmth of her mouth, the slow tugging, the thrilling sensation of his own growth. In the whole pantheon of sex, almost nothing beat a blow job when you least expected it. She paused midway, looking up at him with an oddly serious expression.
“I'm drunk,” she explained. “This doesn't really count.”
Afterward they lay tangled together on the couch, Dave's mind and body humming with a pleasant, low-frequency buzz. He felt himself drifting toward sleep and didn't bother to fight it. Julie lifted her head off his chest.
“I hear Ian quit the band,” she said.
“What?” Dave blinked a few times, struggling back toward alertness. “Who told you that?”
“Tammi. She called me this afternoon. Was it a bad scene?”
Dave thought back on the rehearsal, wondering at the speed with which he'd put the evening's events out of his mind. Part of it was distraction, he thought, and part of it was denial, but most of it was simple disbelief: on some level, he simply couldn't accept the fact that his days of making music with Ian were over. The Wishbones weren't just another throwaway band. Something about them felt real and permanent, like a family. Ian just couldn't walk away from it.
�
��I'm not sure he's really leaving,” he said.
“Tammi said he's fed up with it.”
Dave didn't respond. All at once, everything seemed wrong. He concentrated on controlling a momentary surge of panic that made him want to leap up from the couch and shout “No!” He didn't want to get married. He didn't want to join Shiny Angels. He didn't want the Wishbones to fall apart.
“Maybe this is a good time for you to quit too,” Julie suggested.
The bad feeling passed. Slowly, his breath returned to normal.
“I've been in bands ever since you've known me,” he explained. “I wouldn't know what to do with myself.”
“You'd be fine,” she said, tracing her finger lightly over his collarbone. “There are other things in life besides playing music.”
She must be right, he told himself. Other people seemed perfectly happy living normal lives, working and raising families. It didn't seem to matter to them that they were never going to be rock stars, weren't even going to get the thrill of playing covers at a wedding, making people dance until they glowed. Other people seemed perfectly happy.
“I'd be lost,” he told her.
KARMA HOUSE
Dave generally liked spicy food and was often disappointed by what passed for Mexican or Indian or Chinese food in the suburbs. But this Karma House vindaloo was way out of his league: moments after he swallowed the first bite, it ignited like a blowtorch in his throat.
He snatched up his water glass, only to discover it empty. Gretchen's glass was empty too, as were the two twenty-two-ounce bottles of Taj Mahal they'd polished off waiting for their food to arrive. Dave grinned to conceal his anguish. A small, strangled cry escaped from his lips. His mouth was a seething cave of fire.
“Are you okay?” Gretchen asked. Her face seemed warped and blurry, as though viewed through a pair of bad eyeglasses.
“Water,” he gasped, abandoning all pretense of composure. “Water.”
Gretchen waved, and a tuxedo-clad waiter came charging down the narrow aisle, metal pitcher in hand. He poured the water, then stood by without expression as Dave downed the whole glass in a single gulp.
“A bit spicy?” the waiter inquired. He was a trim young man with delicate features and a haughty posture.
“A bit.” Dave conceded. His vision had returned to normal, and he saw the people at nearby tables watching him, some with compassion, some with amusement, others with that peculiar New York look of bland curiosity that probably wouldn't have changed if he'd keeled over and died right in front of them.
He tossed the second glass down the hatch, but the fire still wasn't extinguished. When he requested a third, the waiter set the pitcher down on the table.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“More poori bread,” Gretchen instructed him. “And another Taj Mahal.”
Generously, she offered to swap entrees. Hers was lamb curry; she said it was a little on the bland side.
“No thanks,” he said. “I couldn't do that to you. I'll just fill up on bread and rice.”
“But I like hot food.”
“This isn't hot. It's satanic.”
She ignored the warning, stubbornly pushing her own plate across the crowded table.
“I'm not going to sit here and watch you starve on my birthday.”
“In that case, I'll order another entree.”
“Don't be ridiculous. Hand it over.”
With grave reluctance, Dave surrendered the fearsome vindaloo. He gritted his teeth in sympathetic dread as she took a cautious first bite, tilting her head thoughtfully as she chewed. Her second bite was larger, without fear.
“It's a little hot,” she said without conviction, obviously humoring him.
“A little? It's like eating napalm.”
“It's good,” she said with a shrug. “Much better than the curry.”
Now that his mouth was pacified, Dave picked up where he'd left off, admiring her from across the table, her glossy dark hair, long neck, and slender arms, all bathed in the strange pink light of the Karma House, a festive glow produced by crisscrossing chains of red Christmas bulbs strung across the ceiling. The restaurant was tiny, narrow as a bowling lane, the cramped feeling only intensified by piped-in sitar music and mirrored walls that multiplied the dozen or so tables into a dizzying wilderness of diners.
Aware of his scrutiny, Gretchen looked up, her expression at once shy and oddly direct. Dave smiled back. It felt good to be alone in public with her, on a legitimate date. He took a moment to reflect on the care with which he'd planned the evening, and how well it was panning out. Julie and his parents were under the impression that he'd traveled into the city with Alan Zelack to check out a marathon Battle of the Bands at CBGB's, an event that wouldn't start until midnight and probably wouldn't conclude until four in the morning, and that they would spend the remainder of the night in Zelack's cousin's apartment in the meat-packing district. The alibi, as far as Dave could determine, was airtight— neither his parents nor Julie knew Zelack except by reputation— and the resulting sense of freedom had left him exhilarated all day, a feeling that had reached its pinnacle when Gretchen appeared at the door of her apartment in that simple, dusty blue sleeveless dress, her arms elegantly unencumbered by their usual platoons of bracelets. He still couldn't get over how great she looked.
“You're amazing,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I said you're amazing.”
“Why?”
“You just are.” Dave surprised himself with his enthusiasm; he felt stupid and happy and full of conviction, drunk on beer and pink light. “You're just so perfect tonight.”
She didn't respond quite the way he'd hoped. Instead of blushing or thanking him, she turned away. Her face in the Karma House mirror looked wounded, almost stricken.
“Please don't talk to me like that,” she said, addressing her reflection instead of Dave.
“Why not?” he said. “It's true.”
“It just makes it worse.”
Dave knew better than to ask her to clarify her pronouns. They'd been down this road before; he just hadn't expected to be back on it tonight. Her birthday was supposed to have been a reprieve, an antidote to the sadness that had been dogging them. He felt the bottom falling out of the entire night, all because he'd told her she was amazing.
“It's the dress,” he explained. “It's perfect on you.”
“Please,” she said. “Don't make me cry in public.”
Just then the waiter arrived with their poori bread. He set it down on the edge of the table, a round, steaming envelope of air, balanced precariously on a small wooden board. Dave and Gretchen paused to study the puffy loaf for an improbable length of time, waiting for its inevitable collapse. Miraculously, the bread held its shape. Dave wondered why it didn't just float up to the pink ceiling like a tiny dirigible.
“I really don't think I can see you anymore,” she told him.
She Said It would be one thing if she had even the vaguest idea of what was going on in his head. But she didn't have a clue what he thought about any of it—her, Julie, his impending marriage, his entire life.
“If I were you I'd be going crazy. But you just keep drifting along like all this makes perfect sense. Well, I've got news for you, Dave. It doesn't.”
He had to admit she had a point. There really wasn't a reasonable explanation for his behavior, at least not one he'd feel comfortable speaking out loud to another person. If someone had told him a story about a guy who got involved in a torrid affair a couple of months before his wedding, Dave would've assumed, at the very least, that the guy was an asshole, and he had no doubt that that was what other people would think of him if they got wind of what he was up to with Gretchen. But the truth was, Dave didn't actually feel like an asshole. It seemed to him, though he knew better than to try to persuade anyone else that this was the case, that he was doing what was possible to save himself from being a complete asshole—to Gretchen, to Julie,
and also to himself. He mopped some curry off his plate with a piece of bread.
“It was a case of bad timing.”
“Spare me,” she said. “I'm sick of hearing about our bad timing.”
“But it's true.”
“So what? What good does it do to keep repeating it? The question is, what do we do now?”
“Try to be happy,” he said. “It's all you can ever do.”
“Try to be happy?” Her eyes grew wide and miserable. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“We're here together now,” he pointed out, trying to ignore the strains of Bob Seger's “We've Got Tonight” that had suddenly flared up in his head. “Can't that be enough?”
Her expression seemed to soften as she considered this possibility. With a little imagination, he thought, the cryptic look on her face might even be taken for a smile.
“You're the one who's amazing,” she told him.
“How so?”
“I thought I was a master of denial, but you're incredible.”
“What am I denying?” he asked, honestly surprised by the charge.
“Nothing important.” She brushed away the question with a breezy flick of the wrist. “Just that you're getting married in a couple of weeks.”
Dave almost laughed. “I'm not denying that, believe me. I couldn't if I wanted to. People don't realize what a big job it is to plan a wedding.”
“I wouldn't know.”
He ignored the bitterness in her tone. “So what else am I supposedly denying?”
“See?” she said. “You even deny that you're in denial.”
“Isn't that the whole point? I mean, you can't be in denial and know about it. That defeats the whole purpose.”
He knew he'd scored a point, but it came at the price of Gretchen's interest in the conversation.
“Forget it,” she said, sounding more bored than irritated. “I'm sorry I brought it up.”
Dave knew he was screwing up. All he'd wanted was to give her one great night, a birthday celebration they'd both be able to remember no matter what happened in the future. And yet here they were, despite all his good intentions, mired in a nitpicky debate about the meaning of denial.
