by Anna Bruno
Later, I started noticing her around town. She frequented Soul Night at a club so divey I can’t really call it a club, more of a bar with a decent-size stage that hosts bands and DJs from out of town. She was, in fact, studying dance at the U. She had long, wavy blond hair, and a quick smile. At the restaurant, I assumed her act was a play for tips, but when we struck up a conversation at Soul Night, I liked her immediately. Her first name was Ellis, which I liked too—I liked it as a girl’s first name. I admired her sunny disposition, which was something I never had and always assumed men wanted.
Lucas only had eyes for me, though. He managed to avoid looking at her ass entirely, or if he did, it escaped my notice.
“I moved here because I don’t have a high tolerance for pain.”
His expression was quixotic.
“There was this woman,” I said, “in New York. Her name was Pamela Randolph Walsh. She had a high tolerance for pain. I didn’t.”
“Who is she?” he asked.
“Nobody, really, just a VP at an investment bank, working her way through the ranks.”
“Middle management?”
“I guess. Most of my students would kill to have her job.”
“It is he who is dead and not I! A classic Ivan Ilyich scenario: your students are destined to clamor for transfers and promotions.” Lucas remembered everything he’d ever read.
“It must be agonizing to be you. Truly horrible,” I said.
“Why?”
“To have all those books swimming around in your head all the time. What does it all mean? Das Sein! Death! The abyss!”
He bit his lower lip.
The kitchen was backed up. We downed an entire bottle of red before Ellis delivered the appetizer. A long, slow meal suited us just fine. Lucas ordered another bottle.
“I mean, how do you even stay hard?” I said. “You’ll be having sex and suddenly your brain will flood with thoughts about the basic income experiment and Bertrand Russell—”
The second bottle of wine created a false sense of privacy, even as we eavesdropped on the people around us. The couple next to us was older, a professor and his wife, from the looks of it (wrinkled khakis, shapeless after a couple hundred wash cycles, oversize navy sweater atop a button-down, collar tucked in, rimless suburban-dad glasses, brown comfort shoes, rubber soles, of course—his approach to fashion no different than his approach to God: agnostic). My attention occasionally strayed from Lucas, and I caught wind of their circumstances—he sent his steak back because it was too rare; she said he should slow down on the bread. Even as I observed them, hoping desperately that we would never become them, it didn’t occur to me that they probably heard our conversation too. Perhaps if it had, I would have bitten my tongue, curtailing talk of sex and politics. But the great thing about the second bottle of wine is that neither of us cared what they thought, and perhaps that was what separated us and them. We’d never be the kind of people who sent food back to the kitchen.
“Basic income?” This piqued his interest.
“Or whatever. Definitely something socialist. You’re a closet socialist.”
“So you’re worried I won’t be able to stay hard when we have sex, because I’ll be thinking about basic income?”
“Actually, you’re not a closet socialist. You’re totally out of the closet,” I said.
“Riiight, only bankers can maintain hard-ons these days,” he said.
“Yeah, exactly. Their heads are empty—”
“Nothin’ in there but mothballs and party drugs,” he said.
“Seriously, though. I have no idea how you function on a daily basis.”
The man at the next table ordered an espresso. His wife waited until Ellis retreated, and then said, “Do you really need that? It will keep you up.” The man insisted espresso didn’t affect him. The woman looked at her watch; it was after nine. She was ready to go home. I imagined how the rest of their night would go: He’d put down his espresso in two gulps as he paid the bill. They’d walk to their car, which was parked on the street outside. She’d offer to drive because he’d ordered two glasses of wine, but he’d insist he was fine. They’d listen to NPR on the radio, probably jazz or bluegrass at this time of night, for the duration of their ten-minute drive to the part of town where all the professors lived. He’d pour himself a nightcap and turn on the TV. On the couch, he’d drift off almost immediately. She’d head upstairs and get ready for bed. Maybe she’d read a book for a while. Then she’d go down and rouse him, telling him to come to bed for his own sake, after which she’d lie awake and listen to him snore, deferring her dreams until he left for the office in the early morning.
Lucas grabbed my hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll be able to keep it up. You’re so beautiful. You’ll be like that one prostitute Nietzsche had sex with. Three minutes of bliss—he didn’t have a care in the world.”
“Didn’t Nietzsche contract syphilis from that gal?”
“That was a smear campaign. He had regular old brain cancer.”
I had only a vague memory of The Death of Ivan Ilyich from a Russian lit class I took in college—something about a man’s emotional and physical suffering at the very end.
“Ivan Ilyich played the game his whole life,” Lucas said. “The best part is when he sees himself in his wife and daughter, all that for which he had lived.”
“He doesn’t like what he sees?”
“He questions whether his life is a deception.”
“Maybe he’s just having a senior moment. The keys are in the freezer, Ivan!” I held on to Lucas’s smile for a beat. “So you think I saw myself in Pamela Randolph Walsh and questioned the authenticity of a life in banking.”
“Your words, not mine.”
“A true company woman; a total bore?” I said, thinking aloud.
“Is that what you thought of her?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “She might figure it out before she lies down to die.”
“Have you figured out what you want?”
“Most definitely not.” I lifted my glass.
“Cin cin,” he said.
After the meal, Lucas ordered a port. I ordered a white chocolate martini. This bought us another thirty minutes or so, before the worries of tomorrow set in. I had to teach a class in the morning, and though he didn’t say so, Lucas was probably due at a jobsite by seven. These were early days in our relationship, and they were marked by the time we stole—from sleep and from work—so we could be together for one more drink, which was always one drink too many and, at the same time, never enough.
* * *
THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN fast and hard, yanked by a man on a mission. He walks into the bar, pauses in the entryway, and looks around. He’s maybe thirty, forty tops, white, wearing cargo shorts and a camo T-shirt that has been washed so many times the university’s wordmark is barely recognizable. His short stature and deformed ears indicate a bygone wrestling career, most likely at the U., which has always had a good team. Glory days, long passed.
I brace myself for the Damn, girl, looking fine, for the smell of cigarettes and fast-food breath. None of this happens, though. He makes a beeline for Martin Yagla.
Martin is short too, maybe five foot nine, and he shaves his head because he has started to go bald. Though not nearly as built as the Wrestler, he works out—a tight shirt reveals biceps—but a small gut appeared in his thirties. When he smiles, his teeth take over his face, and it’s obvious he has them cosmetically whitened, because they are blue white—too white. Anyone in town would know to find Martin here. Everyone calls him Yag, or Dr. Yag, because he has an MD.
He sits to my right with the latest in a steady stream of twenty-one-year-olds he’s brought to the bar. Yag tells the girl to stop crying, which makes her wail louder. He looks around to see if people are listening and catches my eye. He notices the Wrestler, now hovering next to him.
They shake hands but it’s a hard shake, not a friendly one.
“Should w
e take this out to the alley?” Yag’s opener, ballsy and panicky all at once.
“Listen to you, cool guy,” says the Wrestler.
This is not one of those made-for-TV-movie situations where two guys step outside, each backed by a cadre of buddies: brothers in arms. Martin Yagla is on his own, like the fraternity brother who never sobered up—eventually everyone stops calling.
Whatever is about to happen, Yag probably has it coming. He’s always crossing someone. Himself, usually.
Amelia serves his girl another with a steady hand. I can’t tell if she’s doing it out of compassion, or curiosity, or rote service. The girl moves the straw clockwise in her glass and watches the ice swirl. She is drinking a vodka soda with a splash of pineapple juice, and she’s a hot mess. Tousled hair, coarse from bleach, covers half her face. Her shirt slips off her shoulder, revealing the strap of a pink, lacy bra. She’s wearing very short cutoff jeans, and her bare thighs are stuck to the stool. She’s not bad looking, though, attractive in the same way most college girls are. She is a caricature of youth, and youth counts for everything, especially here.
Two people in this bar are angry at Martin Yagla, and that’s if you don’t count me, because mine isn’t urgent. My anger is like rancid food that’s been sitting out too long. No one dares touch it.
Yag owes the guy ten grand. That’s the short of it. It’s a poker debt from a high-stakes table (high-stakes by Upstate New York standards, which means a little higher than a friendly game, maybe at most a hundred-dollar minimum buy-in). A ten-grand debt must have accumulated over some period. Now it’s time to pay up.
He mumbles something under his breath. Under the fear, there’s anger, and under the anger, there’s indignation.
“What’d you say?” demands the Wrestler.
Cocking his head sideways, looking the Wrestler in the eye for the first time, Yag says, “Your homies cheated. I have proof.”
The Wrestler lets out a low-pitched, dopey laugh. “You played with us every week for a year, man. You never once caught a cheat.”
“I kept track of hands and did the math. The likelihood everything was legit is 0.13657 percent.” The fifth decimal is pretty convincing, but the Wrestler’s not buying it. He shakes his head, maintaining a sly half smile—a smirk that asserts, I have the power here. “Why should I pay when I know you all cheated?” Yag says.
I can think of a reason: this guy will break his knees with a tire iron.
“You can’t calculate your way out of this one, buddy,” the Wrestler says. A surprisingly civilized response.
“I don’t have the money,” Yag says, defeated.
The Wrestler replies, “Borrow the money from your mom.”
“I can’t ask my mom for ten grand, dude. Just give me a little time.”
The guy tells Yag to get up. He complies. They stand there staring at each other, waiting for a waltz to begin.
As the Wrestler rotates his shoulder backward and clenches his fist, a soulful funk melody comes on the jukebox, and by the time the punch lands on Martin’s gut, almost everyone in the bar is bobbing and tapping to “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” by Stevie Wonder. It’s almost poetic.
Yag crumples into himself.
Amelia points at the Wrestler and says, “Get out now.”
He raises both hands into the air, palms open, as if to say, I mean no harm. He tells Yag he has one week, and then he’ll collect directly from his mom, and he hopes she can take a punch better than her piece-of-shit son. Then he turns and walks toward the door.
At the last second, he looks at Cal and nods. They know each other, which isn’t unusual—everyone knows everyone in this town—but the expression on Cal’s face betrays that they know each other for a specific reason. My best guess is that it’s drug related, and that this guy and others just like him have been out to Cal’s ranch many times. Most of them carry weapons and none of them are very nice people, not the types of people good parents allow around their children.
Cal’s ten-year-old daughter, Summer, is in her own world, drawing on construction paper, chewing on her tongue. Summer is allowed to hang out at The Final Final before ten o’clock as long as she doesn’t sit at the bar. Her little body moves back and forth to the rhythm of the music. She looks happy. I tell myself that I, of all people, have no right to judge, and go back to my drink.
The Wrestler swings the door gently this time. He goes silently into the night.
Outside, there’s a storm brewing, one of those big ones that mark the interlude between summer and fall. Everyone knows it’s coming because darkness looms, the air is dense, and the insects have stopped rubbing their wings.
Before Yag is back on the stool next to his girl, he looks at me and says, “Mind your own fucking business, Emma.”
“Poor little Martin,” I say. “Better run home to Mommy.”
“You’re the reason I started playing poker with those guys in the first place,” he says, which is a partial truth, but the broader truth is that Yag’s a fuckup, and that’s hardly my fault.
* * *
YAG ATTENDED COLLEGE AT the U. back in the day, along with Lucas and many of their high school buddies, but took several years to graduate because he lost his mind—a result of, as the story goes, a bad trip on LSD.
He claimed he and Marshall Mathers were going in together to buy a city block in Detroit, which they planned to develop into a luxury high-rise condo building. He lied about other things too—little things, things no one would ever lie about because they could be disproven with a single phone call or internet search. Once, he insisted Jimmy was over at his place smoking a bowl when Jimmy was three thousand miles away backpacking in the Sierras. Lucas pulled up a picture Jimmy had sent him but Yag insisted the picture was taken weeks or months earlier. Arguing with him was futile. His mind played tricks on him. Signals got crossed and he believed in these falsehoods with total, blind conviction.
According to Lucas, back when they were in college, Yag would walk into the bar talking about a big math problem he was working on. He talked about it as if he could solve one problem and it would change the world. He didn’t, or it didn’t. But he did eventually get a degree in math from the U. He bummed around for a few more years, working in restaurants and bars, dipping in and out of Lucas’s life. Yag never left town. I think, even in adulthood, he needed the stability his parents provided.
One day he told Lucas he wanted to prove he could finish something: his own life. Lucas thought he should finish something else instead. They stayed up chain-smoking cigarettes on the stoop until four o’clock in the morning, and Yag walked away knowing he would apply to medical school and study psychiatry. He entered med school at the U. around the time Lucas started working for his dad’s drywall business—they were both twenty-eight—and he graduated five years later, having to take one off because he had another psychotic break. He practiced medicine for three months as a resident physician before walking out, telling everyone that it wasn’t for him and that nurses “could be real bitches.” Through the grapevine I heard that an older nurse, someone with seniority, asked Dr. Yagla to go get the newspaper for her, which was left at the front desk of the hospital. Yag refused to do it, asserting Nurses do not tell doctors what to do. Word got back to his attending physician, who immediately put him on permanent paperboy duty. Yag quit.
* * *
I ADJUST MY BODY on the stool. Yag and his teary-eyed girl have picked up where they left off, rudely interrupted by the Wrestler. He slumps over his beer. They both look down at his phone.
The girl is preoccupied by Yag’s cheating ways. She doesn’t get hung up on the fact that he was just punched in the gut by some guy he’s into for ten grand. For a reasonable person, this would be a huge red flag, a reason to run the other direction. If I cared, even a little bit, I’d shake some sense in to her.
Martin Yagla skulks behind his girl—was it Carol, Sheryl?—as if he can use his body to muffle the sound of her tears. She
braces herself, holding on to the bar with two hands.
He takes a breath so deep I can see his chest rise and fall. “People are looking, Caroline. Can we talk about this some other time?”
It’s hot and muggy outside, and in an hour, it will probably storm. I check the forecast on my phone. By eight o’clock there is a 96 percent chance of rain, which is the equivalent of certainty. Meteorologists just don’t have the balls to call it.
Yag doesn’t have a car. His license is currently suspended, a result of his second DUI. And he isn’t about to invite her back to his parents’ house, where he lives in the basement. The girl probably lives with four roommates who haven’t yet graduated from the U. There’s no place for them to fight privately. Also, they’re shameless.
The girl turns and grabs at Yag. She demands, “Let me see your phone.”
I stare but neither of them seems aware of me anymore.
He says no, but when she asks why, he can’t come up with an excuse. He’s too drunk to persuade her with an argument about his right to privacy. On some level, he seems to understand he has already shown his hand. She’s seen something, and she can’t unsee it. He thrusts the phone in her direction, and she begins scrolling silently.
“I told you I’m not interested in her romantically.” His words slur. His voice is loud and abrasive.
“But you hooked up?” Caroline lacks confidence. She knows this to be true already but she asks the question anyway.
“We were drunk,” Yag blurts out. He reaches over and asks Amelia for another stein of beer. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Did you have sex?” The girl sucks compulsively from the little straw in her drink.
He throws up his hands, What do you want me to say? He looks up at the TV. I follow his lead. The pitcher throws the ball to first base to hold back a runner boldly tagging up, way off the bag. He dives back to first. Safe.
“Why do you owe that guy ten thousand dollars, anyway?” she asks as she scrolls. You go girl—ask the serious question.
