Everybody Has Everything (24 page)

“Well, Elspeth, I wouldn’t say that’s entirely true,” said Ana. “Suppression is a significant aspect of the working world. What do people say? ‘It’s business, it’s not personal.’ ”

The blond woman, buoyed by what she perceived as Ana’s defense of her, piped in: “I read in some magazine that if someone at work ever says that to you, like because you were crying or something? That what you should say is: ‘It might be business, but I’m a person, so it’s personal.’ ”

Ana took this in then laughed bitterly for a moment until halted by the girl’s crestfallen face. She had meant this anecdote seriously.

“I only have one piece of advice for your generation,” said Ana. The two women leaned in. “Get off Facebook. It will expose you.”

Ana excused herself, gliding through the room on rails, making stops here and there to shake hands, dole out praise, make mention of her most recent settlements and victories.

She was looking for James, because James was her way of
differentiating herself from this. Even now, he remained her rock ‘n’ roll connection, some vestige of her childhood in the demimonde. Whenever she drank this much, she longed to believe she had just been dropped into her work, temporarily, like someone in a witness protection program. This part of the job was tolerated for the sake of the hours it allowed her in the office. If she could suffer through these nights (and she did, adored by all), then she could retreat tomorrow to the sprawling problems waiting to be clipped and contained on her computer.

He was in the shadows, back to her, arms moving, beer sloshing out of his glass. When he pulled back, he revealed Ruth, looking less wan than usual in a black dress of indeterminate taste. Her feet, however, were in thick-heeled laced booties that made Ana think of war nurses. But her face was ecstatic, flushed, her eyes alight, and James, when he turned to Ana, was panting as if he’d sprinted through a door, his forehead shiny, his hair on end.

“Ana!” he said, too loudly. He leaned in for a nuzzle.

“James was telling me about when he went to Liberia,” said Ruth, revealing the piled teeth. “I’m really into Afro beat.” Ana nodded. She had almost forgotten about James’s trips, how many years he’d spent traveling with a film crew and how he would return with stacks of photos and anecdotes and some unwearable beaded garment as a gift. What struck her about those trips was how similar they were, how every country suffered exactly the same poverty and the same corruption. Back and forth between those two poles, with James vacuuming stories from the inside of the countries, all that heartbreak residue to collect.

“You used to spend so much time on the road,” said Ana,
reaching a hand out as a server walked by, plucking another glass of white wine.

“Do you guys want to go dancing?” asked Ruth. And if he were a cowboy, James would have taken off his hat, flung it in the air, and hooted: “Hell, yeah!” Ana considered the alternatives and nodded her assent.

The club was on a street between a Portuguese grocer—salted cod suspended in the window; a strange chemical soap smell as they walked past—and an auto garage. Ana rubbed her hands together to get warm while Ruth stood to the side, texting invisible friends about guest lists and entry.

James said: “We should call Ethel.”

“Should we?”

He dialed, his fingers growing colder. Ana couldn’t hear what he said, standing between two people on their cell phones in the nothing streetlight, watching the babies, babies going in and coming out, their unlined faces under knitted caps and curtains of long hair. This season, Ana noted, beards were back. Almost every guy entering had a grizzly backwoods coating. Was that where James had gotten the idea for his?

But around their eyes, only youth, flat and nervous and boyish, like they couldn’t believe they were out on a school night.

“Everything’s good,” James said, putting his phone in his pocket. Ana looked at him blankly.

“With Finn. Everything’s good.”

“Oh,” said Ana. “Good, good.”

“He went right to sleep,” said James, covering a little pull of disappointment over the fact that Finn didn’t require him at bedtime.

Inside the club, the band, too, was bearded, all except the female singer, who had bangs that covered half her face. There were so many of them, Ana felt like she was looking at a Dr. Seuss picture of alike creatures populating a village: This one has an accordion, this one has a saw, this one has a tuba. But when they turned it up, it sounded good, cacophonous, pure.

“It’s not a band, it’s a collective,” shouted James at Ana, delivering a new piece of information.

Ana laughed. “How Stalinesque!”

Ana sipped her beer, far from the band, near the bar, while James and Ruth attempted to talk over the noise, their heads tilted together, nearly touching at the top. They gave up and James separated, stood upright, and stared, fighting the impulse to go to the front, to climb up on stage.
I could have done that
, he thought.
I could have been that!
This exact thought was already snaking through the room, especially in and out of the heads of the few guys older than thirty. For the younger ones, there was no sense of regret yet; still a possibility, still a chance.

James bought two beers, knowing that the severance money was going to run out in six weeks and wondering what that would look like: Would he get an allowance from his wife? He shut up the thought, taking in the stink of old bar cloths and the deodorant of strangers. He saw his wife moving away from him, cut off from her by young men who looked like James used to look, and women in lipstick who seemed black in the dark.

“Do you want to smoke?” asked Ruth. James couldn’t see Ana, and he nodded, feeling bundled in bandages. He handed Ruth a beer.

He went outside with her, under the streetlamp. He lit a cigarette and offered her one. She raised an eyebrow, led him to
an alleyway, and pulled a joint out of her wallet. James laughed at himself: “
That
kind of smoke,” he said. How long had it been since anyone had invited him to smoke pot?

He studied her face as she lit up: slight lantern jaw keeping her from prettiness, and a kind of a put-upon sadness that was unappealing. But she was sympathetic, too, because she was trying so hard. He took a long, deep drag, and another.

Nearby, a small crowd of people were doing the same thing, two guys and a girl. A pretty girl with black hair, smiling at him as she exhaled, lifted her fingers in a wave. Emma.

She walked with her hips forward. Her jacket was tight around her breasts and came out from her waist like a bell. As she moved, she was backed by the muffled sound of the band, frantic and ominous. (An organ? Did they bring out a goddamn organ, too?)

“My God. How weird is this.” She said it like it was a good weird. “I see you everywhere.”

Ruth, if James wasn’t mistaken, looked a little annoyed. Her hand was extended into space, waiting for James to take a drag.

“I don’t—this is Ruth.”

“I think I know you. Were you at Yoshi’s book launch?” asked Emma, peering at her.

Ruth shook her head no, suddenly a bumpkin, and the difference between the two women glared like a lantern in the darkness.

“Do you want—” Ruth thrust the joint at Emma, who plucked it from her fingers and inhaled.

“Where’s your wife?” Emma said, as if she knew Ana. She was bolder tonight, perhaps buoyed by the frisson from the club, the pot. She passed the joint to James, who was feeling the widening of his sensations but inhaled deeply anyway.

James gave Emma a backstory: A few hours earlier, she had come from her father’s place in an Edwardian in the north end of the city. There, in one of her two childhood homes, she had sat through a long meaty dinner, enduring a simpering lecture from her stepmother, whose face was so chemically altered that she resembled a bank robber with a stocking over her head. On her way out, she’d stolen a handful of Xanax from the master bathroom, chewing them up on the subway platform. So probably she was afloat right now, even higher than he was. James watched her burning electric, like a neon-colored cartoon character outlined in black ink.

James didn’t know how he got separated from Ruth. Later, he pictured her forlorn expression, her stubbed-out half-joint gingerly placed in her wallet for later, her trudge inside the club to the tune of a slow morbid song, the organ and the saw. He was certain that she had reentered the bar, searching the crowd for Ana, nowhere to be found.

But James hadn’t tried to find her. He stayed in the alley, crushed against the body of a woman eighteen years younger, the scent of gutter urine absorbed by his ankles. He pushed her to the wall, and it all came back to him, what to say, the slow constant patter—
You’re so beautiful, you’re so, so
, so—and his hand, and then his fingers, all this with her coat on but opened and the feel of her soft bra, black, he thought, but even with his eyes open, he couldn’t see much, just shadows. But he had mapped the body in his mind so often that he knew where to go, and found her wet beneath her clothing, moving until she shuddered in his hand. Then she had her hand on his buckle and he thought of his belly hanging over the edge of his jeans, but it wasn’t repulsive enough to stop her sliding down the wall, getting on her knees. He could no longer hear the music
then—they were far away—just the white noise in his head, a string between the noise and the feeling of her warm mouth around him, her tongue and a slight nibble that he found both painfully self-conscious and unbearably good, so much so that James put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her mouth off him just in time, the wet mess remaining on his pants, far from her face looking up at him, the chewed lipstick on those thick lips. He looked upon the strangest grin, a smudge of destruction and shame and pride.

James backed away, the two of them returned to their own bodies, their hands doing snaps and buckles and putting themselves away as easily as they had served themselves up just a few minutes before.

James wanted to be heroic, to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to swear it off forever, but he said nothing, only felt the walls around him tilt and whirl ever so slightly. They walked back to the club together, but a half block before it, still in the shadows of the alley, Emma stopped.

“I’ve got to meet some people,” she said. James wondered if he should kiss her. Before he could decide, she reached into her pocket, and James felt a tingle of curiosity: What else did she have to offer? Was it not over? Then she pulled out her phone and ran her fingers over its face. She backed away, typing and waving.

The club was still full. James felt he had been away for days, but it had been less than a half hour from the air to the joint to the girl’s mouth around his cock.

Ana appeared beside him, carrying two plastic cups of beer. What surprised him was the calm he felt and how recognizable it was. He had almost forgotten, in his time with Ana, that he had always been a liar, that he had gone from bed to bed in one
night on several occasions and looked women in the eye with ease. Just washing a few key body parts and carrying a toothbrush in his backpack had been enough to get him through university. He was good at this.

What he wouldn’t consider (until morning, oh, morning) was how refined Ana’s sense of him was. What did she know, or fear, about this part of James, that had been lying dormant for all those years?

“Were you smoking a joint with my subordinate?” Ana shouted over the music, smiling, passing him the beer. James relaxed. Her face was dancing with drunkenness. He had not seen her so loose in weeks, or longer. If he was honest with himself, that static between them had been crackling long before Finn arrived. James took the beer and drank it in one sip, washing away Emma’s taste. Then he grabbed his wife by the waist and kissed her. Those hipbones against him; her familiar mouth, welcoming, and a wave of loss smacked him, broke his grip on her. The band was louder than it had been, but sadder, too, filled with urgency.

“Careful,” she said, as he lurched apart from her, brushing the droplets of beer that had splashed on her wrist.

“What about Finn?” Ana asked suddenly.

“What about him?” shouted James.

“We should get home.”

Both of them drained the plastic cups. James made a gesture to throw his on the ground, but Ana intercepted, depositing them both in a recycling bin as they pushed through the crowd.

They were close enough to walk home, through city streets full of people shouting for no particular reason, into phones, at each other, at cabs roaring past.

“I need to go in here,” said James, under the glow of the 24-hour drugstore sign.

“Can it wait until tomorrow? I’m so tired,” said Ana, realizing how true that was, how she felt that her skin had separated from her flesh. Inside, the aisles were painfully bright, but quiet. Ana followed James silently.

“Here,” he said, pulling a small brown stuffed dog from a rack of animals. “What kid doesn’t want a dog?”

“That’s what we came in here for? It’s two in the morning.”

“We’re a block from home,” said James, paying in a great clattering shower of coins.

“Yes, but I’m tired,” said Ana, the drink thickening her voice. Back outside in the cloud of yelling youth, she added: “And where the hell did you go anyway? I was waiting for you. Your little girlfriend looked crushed that you left her.”

James gripped the dog tightly by the neck. “What girlfriend?”

“Ruth. Why, is there another one?” Ana laughed, and the arrogance of James’s question seemed to distract her from her irritation. She put an arm through James’s as they turned on to their block, toward the brothel house, where candlelight flickered in an upstairs window. As they got closer, Ana realized it wasn’t candlelight, but the blue flutter of a television set.

“It’s nice you got him that dog,” she said. “You’re a good doggy. A good daddy, I mean.” And she was laughing like a lunatic again when James unlocked the door of the house. There was Ethel sleeping on the living room couch, a magazine and a green throw blanket covering her body, and the quiet hum of a house in order singing along beneath his wife’s drunken laughter.