Further Joy (29 page)

Cammie's job, on the other hand, was orchestrating the dessert room at a pricy steakhouse down in Tampa. She was paying me $350 a week right out of her salary, and the deal was that when the restaurant opened I'd be in for a percentage and get a job with them—assistant manager in charge of sweeping or something. Chopping up the salsa. Didn't matter to me. When I pictured Cammie and her girlfriend I pictured them peaceful and whispering at the end of a day. Maybe they'd have a lamp on, and they'd each be reading a book, their legs tangled up on the couch. One of them would pass the other a cookie from a plate. They didn't
need
the restaurant. It was a venture that might make their nice life even nicer.

I had no deadline for getting the place ready and I always felt like I was working too fast. I wasn't used to getting paid by the day, wasn't used to being an employee, and I wondered if I was meant to be stretching the tasks instead of burning them up. After a couple weeks, I had the storeroom stripped and the ceiling repainted and the toilets installed and new screens in and the windows gliding up and down with a finger. Lighting fixtures and ceiling fans. Hot water heater. There were a couple steps just inside the door, and I bolted a handrail onto the wall alongside. I had most
of the floor ripped up. I knew I needed to pace myself, so I began a slow morning habit of clearing all the breeze-fallen palm fronds off the front walk. I dragged them to the fence at the rear of the strip mall, where they rested in a brittle rising drift, dry as paper. I had the feeling, doing any of this, of going through motions, a dull, drained feeling, like if anything were going to work out for me it would've already happened.

A couple nights a week, tired from working and from trying not to work, I'd sit in my truck down on the stretch of beach where you could drive cars and I'd wait for people to get stuck. In the dark you could easily veer from the hard-packed strip into the loose sand. One night the dusk brought me this stand-up comedian and this woman twice his age. He was set to perform at a club I'd never heard of, opening for a sitcom actress I'd never heard of. He didn't come up with any funny remarks about being stuck in the sand and, in fact, acted kind of solemn while I hooked him up behind the 4x4. He and his middle-aged woman were in a rental, a late-model muscle car made to look like its classic predecessor. After I hauled the car loose, the comedian said he was eternally grateful, in those words. He'd never been late to a show in his life. The woman was drunk, or maybe she wasn't. Beads and feathers were dangling in her hair. She said this was the last summer she was going to be sexy. She was glad it was lasting forever.

The little city I was living in was a few towns north of Tampa and a few towns south of where I'd grown up. People wound up here because no one else would have them, because there were already too many lawyers in better towns or too many pharmacists in better towns, because they couldn't afford to retire in Naples, because, in rare instances, they were born here. In my case, a bunch of projects had fallen through at the same time. Normally my projects collapsed in a staggered fashion, which always left me with one or two irons in the fire, one or two reasons to be optimistic. Marketing was my area of schooling and I was also handy enough to help out on a construction site, but I'd tried to push into the foreclosures boom, had sought a patent for a lawn-care tool, founded a maid service, bought a slice of an on-demand
storage company that went belly up. I'd taken a couple stabs at the forty-hour-a-week cubicle thing too—once I got laid off and once I hated it so much I wound up walking out in the middle of the morning.

My girlfriend finally had enough, and that's what left me fleeing south for shelter. We'd been together nine years, so “girlfriend” doesn't seem weighty enough a term. We'd always been happy, at least fairly so, until the last year or two. We were the couple who wouldn't split up—everyone else believed that and for a while we did too. It got to where I was rooting for her to leave me, wishing for it every afternoon once the profitless, drummed-up tasks of my day ran out. I had no idea if I was still in love with her or not. Once enough time passes, there's no way to tell. What I did know was that we'd stopped taking meals together, we'd stopped asking how the other's day went, and when we slept together it was like we were actors, like we were trying to convince each other how much passion was still between us. I honestly wanted better for her than what she was getting from me. I honestly wished her well.

So now I was living with Mike and Melanie. Freeloading, one might say. My girlfriend was up in Atlanta and my parents had retired to North Carolina. I had breathing room, at least. Before I left, I'd sold everything that was mine, that I couldn't imagine my girlfriend having use for, and left the proceeds pinned under the toaster for her on the kitchen counter. I only kept my big pretty 4x4. It was my lone significant possession. $350 a week, the fixing-up-the-restaurant money, wasn't enough that I wanted to try getting my own place. It was enough for tallboys and gas for the truck and it felt righteous, pathetic as it sounds, to sock some honest cash in a manila envelope for savings. My girlfriend and I had had some investment accounts together, and I'd taken my name off them. I hadn't wanted to mess with divvying any of that, and I have to say it was a free, clean feeling—not having a money market that inched sideways each month, not moving puny sums from here to there and trying to figure out if it made a difference, perking up or pouting with the rise or fall of the stock market.

Mike and Melanie were lawyers. They had too many rooms in their house so one was Mike's painting studio and one an exercise room. They
were friends of ours, of my girlfriend and me, but somehow it didn't feel awkward that they'd taken me in. It didn't feel like they were taking sides or anything. I think my girlfriend, my
ex
-girlfriend, was happy to be able to talk to Melanie and keep tabs on me. And Mike had always enjoyed my company. I felt like I was using up some kind of capital living with them, all the credit I'd accrued by conducting myself decently. I thought I deserved a soft place to crash because I'd always been fair and forthright. I'd never cheated anyone. I didn't lie.

I didn't know how long I could stay with them—how long I wanted to, or was allowed to. Melanie went for protracted runs around the neighborhood and Mike came home late, usually holding up dinner, amazed and amused at how hard his firm worked him. Most days, they'd leave a bunch of ingredients out on the kitchen counter and I was supposed to cook. This was Melanie's idea. She was smart. She'd buy all these ingredients I couldn't afford, but by cooking I got to feel like I'd contributed. Lamb. Veal chops with rosemary. Steak tartare and mussels. Thai green curry fish.

One day, I was getting some braised pork belly and sweet potato fries underway and Melanie came home and presented me with a pair of sunglasses. They glinted in the dim kitchen lights. They had a case and then the case had a snug baggie it fit inside. I couldn't have made a guess at how much the sunglasses cost. I thanked her and set them up behind the sink, next to a potted bamboo plant.

Melanie hoisted herself onto the middle island to face me and watched as I rubbed fennel seed and allspice onto the meat.

“I decided I'm going to tell you if Dana starts dating anyone,” she said. “And if you start dating someone, I'm going to tell her. I'm not getting into keeping secrets. It's something I decided about how to handle this situation, so I'm letting you know.”

“What if I don't want to hear about her dating someone?” I said.

She picked up half a cabbage and held it in her hands, looking at me like I was playing a tiresome game. I perused the knife block and chose one and slid it out. They had a knife for every different food you could possibly want to cut.

“So?”

“So?” she said.

“Is she dating anyone?”

“No, not yet. I'm saying
if
. I'm just laying out my policy.”

I pulled out a deep fryer and poured oil in it, then pushed a newspaper that was lying there to a safe distance, over near a decorative jug of chili peppers.

“Remember when we all went to Paso Robles?” Melanie said. “This is something I was thinking about.”

I waited.

“The last place we went, we could barely walk. You ran over a rosebush with the rental car. You guys were taking big handfuls of the chocolates. The lady who worked there was getting all worked up, giving us tiny pours, and Mike asked her what kind of champagne she'd recommend for a toddler's funeral.”

“I think I remember that.”

“She kicked us out. She had the phone in her hand, like she might have to call the police.”

“I remember that day,” I said. “Most of it.”

“You fell on the ground laughing,” Melanie said. “I just stood there. I didn't see how it was funny. The look on the lady's face—she was afraid. She was shaking.”

Melanie was wearing skimpy, strappy shoes. She had a lawyer job where she breezed around town to meetings and Mike had a lawyer job where they chained him to a desk.

“I think that's when I got my first glimpse of a side of Mike I see all the time now. The big, jovial bully. He hid that part of himself for years, but that was a glimpse of it. I was just thinking about it today.”

“We were pretty drunk.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “That's a given.”

I watched her eyes get still and dark then, her thoughts drifting off somewhere, away from Paso Robles. She had a little nervous tic she did with her fingernails, and for a moment it seemed she forgot I was standing
there. I picked up a hand towel and folded it into a square, then refolded it. When she finally looked up at me, she only asked how long till dinner.

“Two hours max,” I said. I had the knife and a cutting board ready, and she handed me the cabbage.

“You couldn't fry an egg in college, and now you're like a chef.”

“When we lived in that town in Tennessee there were no restaurants.”

“You see that, you acquired a new skill. I haven't acquired a new skill in a long time.”

“People who fail a lot wind up with a bunch of new skills,” I said.

Melanie shrugged, not quite surrendering the point. She straightened some spice bottles, making it where all the labels showed, before easing herself down off the island and making toward the garage, plucking her running sneakers from the bottom of the stairs as she passed. I heard a door open and close, and then another, and then the hum of the air conditioner. I always felt relieved and anxious at the same time, alone in that cavernous house. I looked out the kitchen window, knowing there was nothing out there but the next lawn.

There'd been talk of polished concrete for the restaurant's floor, but that turned out to be a lot of hassle. I ended up putting down simple, smoke-gray tiles. They were cool and smooth, and I took my shoes off some days and padded back and forth in the long dim room of the future restaurant I would work in and slightly own. It was getting harder to kill time, so one afternoon I took a walk. I'd forgotten about walks. The city had posted new red signs along the beach warning of the fledgling blacktips. The most recent victim had been an elderly woman collecting shells. The shark had leapt from the shallows and beached itself, such had been its lust for the lady's bony, purple-veined ankle. They'd had to kill it to make it let go. It had been out of the water for ten minutes and was still holding fast. They'd gouged its eyes, tried to tempt it with a half-rotted squid, put a lighter to it. Finally, they'd sliced it open and bled it dry and it quit gasping.

*
    
*
    
*

Mike had told me he and Melanie were trying to get pregnant, and several nights in a row I heard them going at it from my room. Mostly I heard
her
. I'd be stretched out on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling, and suddenly I'd hear a noise and realize it was Melanie. It would get louder and then turn into these sharp, breathless chirps. I'd stay right where I was, frozen. It made me jealous, of course, but I also felt like I was doing something wrong, like I should've snuck outside and waited out there until they were done. The next afternoon I'd feel awkward when it was Melanie and I alone, chit-chatting while I cooked, but then Mike would come home and we'd all sit and chew our fork-tender meat and Melanie would have a glass of wine and there'd be earnest, decade-old music playing and all would be normal enough again.

The routine became that I would go out to the porch with Mike after dinner and hang out with him while he smoked, usually with gin drinks, talking sometimes about the pitiful baseball team but mostly about the assholes Mike dealt with every day. Mike hated his boss. He hated his clients. Hearing about all these lawyers and the slimy companies they defended, it was easy for me to believe in that good-guy capital I'd built up.

One evening, Mike clinked his ice cubes around and poured more gin. Then he looked me in the eye and said he envied me. His tie was loose, his eyes glassy. Melanie had gone to bed.

“Your life doesn't boss you around every second,” he said. “Every once in a while you get to choose your next action. I don't remember what that's like.”

“I choose my actions, but I usually don't choose them well,” I told him.