Ordinary Hazards

by Anna Bruno

  After their final journey together, and on the third day of the festival, Dupris’s son, less than twenty years old, virile and muscular, stepped into the wrestling ring, a favorite pastime among the youth in the village. In the third round, he grabbed his chest and collapsed. He was immediately unresponsive and died quickly.

  Gerard Dupris was not yet an old man. Having lost his only companion, he stopped traveling but did not shut himself off from the townspeople. The village prospered for the remaining years of his life, and though it was small, it became known for art and culture and for the annual festival.

  He had already planted the seeds of success but only after his son’s death did people begin to tell his story. Some called him L’Ange de la Mort because he danced with death so gracefully; those who knew him well called him Oncle; most called him Le Maire. Known for his sunny demeanor and toothy smile, Gerard Dupris was the de facto leader of his petite village.

  Among the five hundred or so inhabitants of the village, there was one sculptor. In 1837, one year after Dupris’s death, the villagers commissioned a statue of the man they called The Mayor.

  This story fascinated me, not because it was weird—though in the period of the French aristocracy, it was quite unusual for a peasant to achieve such notoriety—but because very little of it was written down anywhere. Dupris was not someone kids read about in history books. He was not even a particularly interesting historical figure. He didn’t start a war, or end a war; he didn’t invent anything; he wasn’t a craftsman or a philosopher, and according to legend, he wasn’t much of a lover.

  The statue itself was cataloged in Lyon, which was where I found Dupris’s name, but for the rest of the details I had to hire a translator to talk to the remaining villagers—less than twenty now—most of whom were very old. They had learned of Dupris from their parents, who learned of him from their parents, who were possibly kids or maybe not even born yet when the statue was erected. It was an oral history and so it was mythologized in ways that were entirely believable to me.

  The third and final section of The Breakout Effect was about Gerard Dupris. His story was about death and perseverance. At the time I wrote it, both were strangers to me.

  I admired Dupris, and in many ways, he became the hero of my book. Certainly, among my three subjects—Pamela, my father, and Dupris—he was the one who found happiness, or, if not happiness, a kind of spiritual wholeness that I couldn’t define. Lucas later called it the Tao. Whatever it was, it was inaccessible to me. Dupris was many things, but he wasn’t a mother. If he had been, he’d have blamed himself for letting his son set foot in a wrestling ring, or for not making sure his wife had proper medical care, or for not being present when his elder sister fell into the ravine.

  But Dupris was a man, like Chuang Tzu, free to drum on an inverted pot and sing.

  * * *

  GIL AND HIS SILENT sidekick—I mean, second wife—are back. They did a lap around the bar and found themselves right back where they started, next to me.

  “You know what it was? You know how I knew Lucas was gonna buy that place?” The volume of his voice jars me. He doesn’t give me the opportunity to tell him I don’t want to know. “I could see him envisioning all them things he was gonna do.” He says them things in an intentional folksy tone because he figures some people find it endearing.

  “Did Lucas ever fix up the porch?”

  “Yep,” I say, looking only at my whiskey. I fight like a fool to appear ticked off, when what I really feel is my insides turning to salt water. That fucking porch. If only we’d just let it rot. If only. If only.

  Amelia recognizes something—I’m not sure what. She holds my glare for a few seconds and purses her lips. She knows. Aldrich Gilfillan does not know. I assumed everyone in this town knew everything about everybody, but I realize now that either Gil is completely tone-deaf, or he simply doesn’t know. He thinks I still live with Lucas. He thinks we’re still married. No one told him what happened to us.

  This sudden realization of my own anonymity feels fantastic. Part of pain is managing other people’s reaction to pain—the things they ask and the things they avoid. When people ask questions, they usually focus on some narcissistic need to show they care. They conflate empathy with the desire to display empathy, and they want answers that will make them feel good for having asked the questions. Strangers want to be thanked for their concern; friends want to be told how much their support means. They do not want to hear uncomfortable truths. When a soldier comes home from war, he doesn’t sit around at dinner parties talking about how his platoon mate took a piece of shrapnel and bled out in his arms, requesting only that he tell his wife and child how much he loves them. He might show off a scar from a physical wound that has healed over but he doesn’t mention his fractured mind that will never heal.

  I’ve only said about three words to Gil but he’s still hovering, not taking the empty seat next to me at the bar but not moving on either.

  “Welp,” I say. “Nice talkin’ to ya.”

  He hands me a card. “Let me know when you and Lucas are in the market for a bigger house.”

  I lift my whiskey off the bar and push it toward the second Mrs. Gilfillan, who has not spoken a single word. She’s holding a Budweiser bottle by her side. She lifts it to my glass and lightly clinks it against the rim. I think we are both, telepathically, toasting her miraculous endurance of Gil.

  Before Gil walks away he says, “When you see Lucas, tell him hello.”

  * * *

  I LIKE A MAN who can fix things, who knows his way around a shop, who works with his hands. That’s what we all say. That’s the romantic version. But any woman who has ever lived with this kind of man knows the do-it-yourself life is one lived in a constant state of almost-done. She comes home to find a hole in the wall that he’s cut out with a saw so he could access some electrical wiring. He finishes the wiring but doesn’t bother to seal up the hole—even though he installs drywall for a living—because it’s not pressing, because it can be done later, because there are twelve other things that require attention first. Or, all the furniture has been moved to the middle of the room so he can paint but he doesn’t get it done in one weekend, so you sit on it like that for days. Or, there’s a layer of dust everywhere because he sanded something, which may or may not be toxic.

  Other people—the lawyers and doctors of the world—hire professionals, and it’s not sexy but it gets done in forty-eight hours, and then they live their perfect, clean, nontoxic lives, and they have time to throw dinner parties or go to PTA meetings or whatever it is that they do. Sometimes I look at the pale skin of some of my colleagues at the U., baby-smooth hands that are only used to type, and I think to myself, Who do their wives ask to open jars? and then I imagine their gentle sex, and I find myself making a bored face—an expression Lucas could have read with one glance.

  The house on Catherine Street was the night-and-day opposite of the monstrosity I grew up in: a six-bedroom, eight-bathroom, Tudor-style mansion in Wilton, Connecticut, built to look old in the late 1970s. My home with Lucas was like Baby Bear’s porridge. Every inch of it was lived in: the books on the shelves were our favorite books, the kitchen was stocked with everyday equipment—cast-iron pans and spatulas—the couch was good to curl up on, as opposed to the designer sofas and chairs of my youth, which were only meant for display.

  I still think about all the woodwork that Addie scratched up—wood doors and windowsills, floorboards and paneling. Lucas and I spent hours together stripping it—one of those projects we stumbled into ass-backward. Possibly, Lucas thought these things out in advance, but I always just found myself in the middle of them. If memory serves, we decided to strip all the woodwork because we wanted to stain it dark, and we wanted to stain it dark because I had chosen a peachy color for the walls, and we had purchased one gallon of paint for thirty dollars, thereby locking us in. Lucas referred to the peach as titty pink, which I guess meant flesh toned, though it was rea
lly more apricot. He then decided the only way titty-pink walls would look good would be if the woodwork was very dark, and then a week later and we were stripping, stripping, stripping. I didn’t protest because it was exactly where I wanted to be, hanging out with Lucas.

  We finished just more than half of the woodwork, basically everything in the living room and kitchen, except for the window frames—we didn’t make it to the dining room—before we decided to table the project for a year. We were sick of scraping, for one thing, and I wanted to devote more time to my book. Other projects demanded Lucas’s attention—some of the wood on the porch was rotting and the entire exterior of the house needed to be repainted. Did I want all the woodwork to have the same smooth, dark finish? Yeah, sure I did. But to be honest, I didn’t give a rip either.

  * * *

  WHEN I COMPLETED THE Breakout Effect, I gave the draft to Lucas to read.

  Pen in hand, he read it within forty-eight hours. He flipped over the last page and said, “Let’s go to the bar and talk about it,” which was different from “I love it,” what I wanted to hear.

  It must have been a Monday or Tuesday night and damn cold outside, because I remember stepping in from the frozen streets to an empty bar. Only a couple of the high-top tables were occupied by grad-student types. The regulars were all home for the night.

  Lucas flopped down and stripped off his coat and gloves. He requested a whiskey, half rocks, and riffled through the manuscript, finding the second section, the one about my dad.

  I could see all his notes in the margins, in three different colors of pen, and I knew this conversation wasn’t going to make me feel good. Lucas wasn’t the rubber-stamping type. I ordered a Cherry Coke and braced myself.

  No one was playing the jukebox, so Amelia put her own music over the sound system, mellow and bluesy, the right tempo for the beginning of the week, something we could sit with for a while as we talked about the matter at hand. Amelia didn’t ask what was on the paper, though I suspect she already knew it was my book. Lucas and I had been talking about it for months.

  Lucas said, “Do you know what I’m going to say?”

  I glanced down at the marginalia and noted the red lettering, all caps: NOT LIKE THE OTHERS. I told Lucas I had no idea what he had to say.

  “You don’t give your dad any credit,” he said.

  “That’s the point,” I said. “He doesn’t deserve credit.”

  “Pamela and Gerard get the benefit of the doubt. Your dad doesn’t. Why is that?”

  At this point we were only about ten minutes into a conversation that I knew would last hours, and I was already chewing on the ice at the bottom of my soda. I asked for a refill, waited for Amelia to put it on the table in front of me, and watched the bubbles. “He was a shitty father,” I said.

  “Your dad’s not so bad. I mean aside from cheating on your mom—”

  “That’s one big aside.”

  “Your mom is a bit of a battle-ax, not to mention a drinker.”

  “That came after,” I said, suddenly defensive of mothers everywhere.

  I’d taken a test and confirmed it: I was pregnant, finally, after many months of trying. I was still adjusting—fatigued, short on breath, head in a fog. Lionel was growing inside me. He had an X and a Y chromosome. And all his DNA.

  * * *

  PERHAPS LUCAS WAS RIGHT. My mother did drink. But my father definitely drove her to drink more. Mom suffered from postpartum depression. Or, maybe having me just triggered something that had been in her all along. However it originated, the depression came and went in bouts. There were days when she didn’t get out of bed. There were good periods too. She took me out for milkshakes and French fries. We snapped our fingers and swayed to funk music in the kitchen. She taught me how to cook real Italian food. She wasn’t Italian but she became an expert after she married my dad. Her herb garden featured basil, rosemary, thyme, and oregano, the Italian staples, and she employed techniques from the old country, like cooking chicken al mattone. She claimed Uncle Nic taught her how to cook.

  I remember Uncle Nic as jolly. He snorted when he laughed. The guy was always cracking a joke, even when the situation called for restraint. In many ways, he and my mom were cut from the same cloth, which was why they got on so well. They both liked a good dirty martini. They were also both prisoners of their own minds. When I was eighteen, Uncle Nic shot himself in the head in the New York City apartment my dad rented for him. Dad refused to go to the funeral, which my mom planned. At the time, I thought this was just his way of dealing with grief.

  Uncle Nic left one letter when he died. It was in an envelope with my father’s name on it. I dug it out of the trash can in the kitchen.

  Caro Fratello,

  Busy, busy, busy.

  I’m sorry for dipping out on Mattea. A stronger man would have shut the thing down a year ago, tied up loose ends. The restaurant is a source of pain for me. Not because it failed. Because I know it will continue to fail. As tough as you are, you won’t shut it down—not immediately—either because it was my project or our mother’s namesake or, probably, both.

  Every month, you’ll review the books, and you’ll be reminded of your little brother, losing money from beyond the grave. Three or five or ten years down the road, you’ll pull the plug on it. Whoever winds it down, sells off the equipment, won’t bother to strip the sign, MATTEA, and you’ll happen to walk by on your way to that hip sushi joint. You’ll try to look away, but out of the corner of your eye, you’ll see it, empty and abandoned, with a weathered awning and a homeless man sleeping in the doorway.

  This is not how I want you to remember Mattea. I want you to remember the day I pitched you the idea in a garden of potted herbs, with the promise of simplicity—hand-rolled pasta, house-cured meats, table wine, espresso. I want you to remember where it all started, in our mother’s kitchen.

  If I owned the restaurant, I would give it to Emma. She’d know what to do with it. Seeing as you own it, I suppose that’s entirely up to you, and knowing you, I have no doubt you’ll succumb to some free-market, invisible-hand idea, related to what’s best for her, incentives and all that, and you’ll figure you’d be doing her a favor if you left her out of it. That might be true.

  As for me? Remember me for the only things I was ever any good at: making Emma smile, re-creating Mamma’s Bolognese, and, in the end, holding you to your own standards: never throw good money after bad.

  Nico

  Busy, busy, busy was a Vonnegut reference. Uncle Nic was an aficionado.

  Some years later, my dad met me in San Francisco, where I was living, and on our way to dinner, a homeless man tripped and fell on the sidewalk just a couple of feet in front of us. The guy was so close to the entrance of the restaurant that my dad literally had to step over his body to get to the door. I was young at the time and sort of in shock so I just followed his lead. From inside the restaurant, I looked out and watched the man gather himself. Upon seeing my expression, my dad grabbed my arm and said, “A man’s worth is no greater than his ambition.” Biographies and military histories, along with the Wall Street Journal and a few select business periodicals, comprised most of my father’s reading list. Marcus Aurelius fell squarely within his bailiwick.

  Something about the word ambition, spoken through my father’s lips, reminded me of the word abomination, and I realized the two weren’t so far off—abomination was simply an exaggerated form of ambition. For the duration of the evening, I pushed the food around on my plate in shame while my dad ate heartily and talked about San Francisco real estate. He tipped generously.

  When I told my mom this story, she said, “Of course that’s how he feels. Why do you think he didn’t come to Nico’s funeral?”

  Dad probably would have invested in every two-bit business idea Uncle Nic ever had, but the one thing he would not forgive was the obvious eventuality: one day the spaghetti would stop hitting the wall. He despised what he perceived as the opposite of ambition: giving
up.

  Though my mom always blamed the other woman for their divorce, I’m sure it had everything to do with how he saw her depression. In his mind, it was only weakness. I never forgot what he said to me that day in San Francisco.

  * * *

  “YOU NEED TO FORGIVE him,” Lucas said. “And if you can’t forgive him, you need to set aside your personal feelings for the benefit of this book.”

  “It’s a business book,” I said. “Forgiveness has nothing to do with it.” I really believed this was true. The book wasn’t a memoir. There was no mention of his affair, or his absenteeism. I didn’t even mention the homeless fellow he stepped over in San Francisco. Whatever meanness Lucas identified in the draft, I couldn’t see it. I was blind.

  Lucas noticed my defensiveness and we both knew this would be easier if I was drinking. He suggested we go through the other sections first, Pamela Randolph Walsh and Gerard Dupris, and he ordered himself another whiskey.

  “You know Maker’s is the same price as Bulleit,” I said, judging his choice.

  Lucas had mapped out through lines in both sections, scribbled in different colors of ink. He called Pamela’s HIGH TOLERANCE FOR PAIN, and Gerard’s TAO. Each subject had different and equally complex equations, which included but weren’t limited to their unique stories—Pamela’s bookkeeping father and Gerard’s relationship with death. In both cases, their stories clearly mattered in some essential way but their personal attributes allowed them to persevere, which was really the key, because if they hadn’t, then their stories would be just that, stories, and not worth the paper they were printed on.