I Knew You'd Be Lovely (3 page)

He was nodding in the half-light, but of course Gail couldn't see him. He thought he heard a man's voice in the background, and her muffled reply: “It's Bradley.” His breath came out in small white bursts. There was one more thing.

“Are you happy?” he said.

There was a pause. “Yes,” she said, and he knew it was the truth. He felt both pained and relieved.

“I'm glad,” he said. “You deserve it.”

“Bradley!” a voice bellowed from the direction of the food. It was Oscar, with a blonde under one arm and a redhead under the other. He kissed Bradley on both cheeks. “I can't believe you showed up! You are my favorite person in the whole world!” He seemed even more drunk than Bradley, which was saying something. “Are you just getting here?” he said, and Bradley knew he would have to find a way to break it to him that he was wearing his coat because he was on his way out. “Why in God's name don't you have a drink? Here.”

“What's this?”

“Ouzo and Sprite,” Oscar said. “Drink it.” He began introducing the girls. “These are Cricket”—he put his hand on the back of the blonde—“and Jackie.” He patted the redhead.

“Hiya,” said Jackie.

“Hello,” said Cricket.

Oscar released them, pulled an arm around Bradley's shoulders, and nodded in the direction of a pregnant woman. “Have I ever told you I think women are like flowers and pregnant women are like fruit?”

Jackie whacked him on the arm with the backside of her hand.

“What?” he said. “What's wrong with that? There's nothing offensive about that!”

“There most certainly is,” Jackie said.

“Hey, you're Laryngitis Girl!” Cricket said, spotting the clipboard. A second later, Samantha had joined the group. “I heard someone talking about you when I first came in, but I thought they made it up. I thought you were a party myth!”

Samantha slowly shook her head.
Nope, I'm real
, she seemed to be saying.

Oscar extended his hand. “I am Oscar, lovely lady. And this fine fellow is my dear friend Bradley—”

“We've met,” Bradley said. “We were talking for a while. Before.” Samantha handed him her clipboard.

Were you planning on leaving without saying good-bye?

“Of course not. I was about to go looking for you,” he said. From her face he could tell she knew he was lying. He took a sip of the ouzo and Sprite; it tasted dreadful.

Jackie was observing them. “Hey, wouldn't it be funny if you two became fast friends, only then her voice came back, and you couldn't stand the sound of it?” she said, apparently very excited by the idea. Bradley and Samantha stood motionless. Oscar pressed his lips together.

“I don't mean timelessly funny,” she said. “Just, you know, funny in a Seinfeldian sort of way.”

“Wasn't there a princess in some fairy tale who had to give up her voice to save the thing she loved?” Cricket said.

“Like what—a prince?” said Jackie. Oscar laughed, and Cricket shrugged. Samantha began to write.

Who were you talking to out there?

“My wife,” Bradley said. “I mean, my ex-wife.” God.
“Listen, things are over between my wife and me. They have been for a long time.”

You don't have to explain yourself to me
, Samantha wrote, but he noticed she wouldn't meet his gaze.

Cricket craned her neck to see the clipboard. “Can I buy a vowel? Can I buy a vowel?” she said, and Bradley's head began to throb. Had he eaten anything today, other than pickles?

Jackie snapped her fingers. “Listen up,” she said, addressing the group. “See if you can come up with the word that makes use of all the vowels—in their proper order.”

Oscar took off his glasses and began cleaning them with his handkerchief.

“Including
Y
?” Cricket asked.

“Including
Y,
” Jackie said, taking a hearty gulp from her drink.

Bradley handed the ouzo and Sprite back to Oscar. It now felt as if tiny elves were constructing an aquarium inside his skull. “Have you by chance got any aspirin?” he asked Samantha, trying to summon a smile.

Sorry. Guess I'm not much of a doctor
. She looked him in the eye for the first time.
You OK?

“I've got a bit of a headache,” he said, wishing he could tell her everything—that she was the first woman he'd been attracted to since his wife, that the reason he'd moved to the States was so he could officially become a foreigner, since he'd felt like one his whole life.

“Give us a clue,” Oscar said to Jackie. He loved riddles and did the
Times
crossword religiously.

“There are no clues,” Jackie said. Cricket made a frown with puckered lips. “Okay, fine. It begins with the letter F. And that's just because I like you guys.”

“Faeoli,”
Oscar said.

“Not a word!” said Jackie. “And don't try to get funny with me.”

Oscar turned to Bradley. “You all right there, buddy? You're not looking so hot.”

“I'll be all right,” Bradley said, but then felt his stomach fluids reverse direction, as if in a gastrointestinal Coriolis effect.

“Facetiously,”
Jackie announced, and Oscar cursed. Bradley scanned the room to see where a bathroom might be.

“Hey, it's almost midnight!” Cricket said. Instinctively Bradley turned toward Samantha. She was gone again.

“Where'd she go?” he said, grabbing Oscar by the shoulders. “That girl who was just here.”

“I saw her putting her coat on in a hurry. I think her pager went off or something.”

So he'd lost her for real this time. The room began to spin. “I've got a terrific headache,” he said.

“Wow,” Cricket said. “Did you know those were FDR's last words?”

Not at all relieved by this information, Bradley felt as if he were about to vomit. “Where's the bathroom?” he asked, concentrating on the floor.

“Over by the kitchen, where you first came in,” said Jackie.

When he got there, he found a heartbreaking queue. “Ten, nine, eight,” the crowd began to chant. Bradley
pushed his way to the front, hoping they'd be too festive to notice. “Seven, six, five.”
This is a medical emergency
, he was prepared to offer, if anyone objected. “Four, three, two.” He saw the door open, shoved past the person who was leaving—“One”—and barely had time to turn the lock before dropping to his knees. “Happy New Year!” the crowd cheered, as Bradley retched.

He lay on the floor for what seemed like a long time, blurry and exhausted, his thoughts weaving everywhere.
Can I buy a vowel? Can I buy a vowel?
On the other side of the door, the sound of popping corks punctuated the flow of songs and laughter. He was spending the first moments of a newborn year in the fetal position on the floor of a stranger's bathroom. He breathed in the cold, lonely smell of tile and tried to imagine what he might have said or done differently. He remembered something he'd been taught as a child: that in the end, we'll be judged by our dreams as well as our accomplishments, by all that went unspoken as well as what was said. But even as a Catholic schoolboy, he'd rejected the idea as both sentimental and unlikely. And now, with an acrid taste still fresh in his mouth, he rejected it anew. Sometimes things simply didn't work out. Wasn't that just the way of the world? Sometimes you try and try until your heart might break, and still your shot at heaven slips away.

Someone was pounding on the door. Bradley didn't care. He remained on the floor, staring at a loofah sponge and some pink bath-oil beads that must have belonged to Kiki.

“What's going on in there?” a man's voice shouted, and then swiftly, silently, a piece of paper slid under the door.

I have something for you
.

Bradley rose and undid the lock, and there, at the front of the crowd, stood Samantha, with her coat still on. She held out her hand and smiled. In it was a bottle of aspirin.

He wanted to speak but couldn't.
How does one begin?
he wanted to ask her.
How does anyone ever begin?
Samantha's body seemed to answer for her: She took his hand and led him down the hallway, into the elevator, and out the front door.

After the crowded noise of the party, the stillness of the street came as a shock. The snow had stopped falling, and everything—from the trash receptacles to the parked cars to the streetlamps—had been transformed into a fresh version of itself. It was beautiful; it was like waking up into a snowman's dream of Earth.

Samantha slipped her arm through his, and the two began to walk. “Where to?” he said. She leaned in and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. So the pair continued, arm in arm, with no clue where they were going, and no idea what they were in for. But in a way, it didn't seem to matter, and for many city blocks, neither one of them said a word.

The camping trip was Fetterman's idea. Carla had reached the end of her rope months ago and had been looking into one of those hard-core rebellious-teen boot camps, where the unspoken motto seemed to be that you have to be broken before you can be fixed. But then there was a death at the very camp they'd researched: A boy named Martin Lee Anderson—who was also fifteen and even looked a little like Derek—had died after collapsing during a march and then being kicked in the abdomen by one of the counselors. There was a lawsuit, and a
20/20
exposé, and it quickly became clear to both Fetterman and Carla that perhaps tough love was not the answer.

Out of desperation, and maybe a little out of self-loathing, Fetterman decided to confide his child-rearing woes to his ex-wife, a psychoanalyst still living and practicing in their old colonial in Wellesley, Massachusetts. It needled him to think of her in that house. They'd bought it as a fixer-upper, then spent the next seven years accosted
by constant noise, clutter, and inconvenience. And dust—at one point they discovered sawdust even in the empty ice-cube trays in the freezer. By the time the renovations were complete, the marriage had fallen apart. Sonya offered to split the house—let him have the upstairs and she'd keep the downstairs, and her practice—but this seemed the sort of arrangement that kept psychoanalysts in business, and Fetterman didn't bite. Instead he packed his bags and moved to Arizona.

Sonya was a highly respected therapist who'd first become interested in the field when her college roommate told her she gave exquisite advice. She had a way of making her patients feel she was always on their side, deep down, even if she disagreed with them on the surface. Which had made it all the more objectionable to Fetterman that it felt as if she were secretly against him, waiting for him to screw up—and now he finally had, as predicted. Telling her that things had gone from bad to unbearable with Derek, that they'd lost control of him, that they'd even considered one of those boot camps, was as close to self-flagellation as he had ever come. No wonder he could only bear to do it via e-mail. His ex-wife meted out her disapproval succinctly: “When you correct others don't humiliate them. Show them new tenderness; then they will humble themselves.” At first Fetterman had dismissed such lofty naïveté—and from a woman with no children of her own—but in short order began to accuse himself of a possible failure of imagination. A few days later, racking his brain for ways to try “new tenderness,” he'd conceived of the camping trip.

Fetterman worked in tech support and had never been
on a camping trip, but it seemed the sort of excursion on which a father and son might reconnect. In his old life, he might even have imagined a touching lesson imparted while fishing, or a tender explanation of the constellations in the night sky, or a reconciliation after a near-death experience—perhaps a bear attack, or an unsuccessful river fording. In his old life, that is, before he'd had to apologize to the neighbor whose cat Derek lit on fire, before he'd had to explain to a third-grade teacher that there was no way his son had access to actual anthrax. Before his understanding of the world and its inhabitants had been completely transformed.

Fetterman saw no reason to let a simple lack of experience stand in his way. On his lunch hour he drove to the bookstore in the strip mall down the road from his office and picked up
Wilderness Camping & Hiking: The Ultimate Outdoors Book
. The store was out of
Camping for Dummies
, which was fine by Fetterman; one of his overachiever classmates had patented the franchise, and Fetterman would sooner have been bastinadoed (
Medieval Torture for Dummies
) than add to that guy's profit stream.

He sat on a footstool and flipped through the pages, stopping at a diagram that showed how to use your jeans as a backpack by roping the waist and bringing the legs up over your shoulders as straps. The chapter featured all kinds of ingenious solutions to unlikely scenarios; “In Case of Emergency,” it was called. Fetterman closed the book, thinking:
Isn't life just one big, long emergency, happening very, very slowly?
He bought a carrot muffin
and an iced coffee and browsed the rest of the store, skipping the comic book section, of course. The only other book he considered buying was a memoir showcased among the new releases. It was written in the form of a letter from a mother to her runaway teenage daughter. On the back, a savvy blurb read: “Every fifteen-year-old is a runaway, whether she runs away or not.” Fetterman returned the volume to the shelf. Best not to give the boy any new ideas.