Patricia Gaffney (11 page)

H
alf an inch of wet snow fell on Saturday night in the middle of January. At eight o’clock the next morning, Wolfie rang Andrew’s doorbell. He and his snow shovel were the same height. He cleared the walk in five minutes and charged ten dollars. “You got any cocoa?” he asked, blowing on his mittens, chattering his teeth. Andrew said he didn’t think so. “Yes, you do, man. On that shelf with the cookies.”

In the kitchen, Wolfie banged his heels against the chair legs and looked around the room as if he’d never been in it before. “How come it look different in here?” He wouldn’t take off the sweatshirt over his jacket, wouldn’t even put the hood down. Gnomelike, he hunched over his mug of hot chocolate, peering around critically. “Look like nobody live here.”

Andrew cast around for a good conversational topic. Sports didn’t work; he followed college teams, Wolfie liked the Redskins and the Wizards. Wolfie had two sisters and a brother, all older. He looked shocked when Andrew told him he had no siblings, no relatives at all except a father. “Do you like him? Do he like you?”

“It’s…we have a…it’s not…yes, we like each other.”

Wolfie studied him with searching eyes, running his tongue around the inside of his mug. When he went home, leaving footprints on the kitchen floor and chocolate circles on the counter, the house fell absolutely still, as if he’d sucked all the sound out with him.

Rattle around.
That’s what they said about men who lived on their own, but not women.
He just rattles around in that house all by himself.
A cliché.

All morning, Andrew wandered from window to window, staring out at the dull view of the street or the dull view of the alley. He wanted to call Dash, but somehow they’d gotten into a routine of talking to each other every other day, and this was an off day. He thought of going for a run, but the temperature was hovering around freezing and he hated running in the cold. A dull pain under his ribs on the right side came and went. His mother’s cousin had died of cirrhosis of the liver. This pain was lower, though, nearer his large intestine. He did a load of laundry, a small one, just his underwear and socks. The phone rang. He raced to it, said, “Hello?” eagerly, but whoever was on the other end waited a second, then hung up.

He called his father. Edward had a new telephone with a dial on the receiver to turn up the volume, but he didn’t like it: “All it does is make everything louder.” The conversation took a familiar absurd turn when he couldn’t understand the word
church.
Andrew said it over and over, even spelled it. “Church, Dad, did you go to
church
today?” “Hurt? I hurt every day.” “No,
worship.
” “Warship!” his father exclaimed, disgusted, sarcastic. “Did they take you to the
chapel
today? In the
main building
?” He was shouting; Edward was growing furious. “Never mind, Dad, it doesn’t matter.” “What?” “I’ll call you tomorrow!” They hung up with mutual antagonism.

A few minutes later, Chloe called.

“Hi, Dad! Happy Sunday. How’s it going?”

His pleasure in hearing her voice was diluted by something almost like shame: In the last few weeks he’d turned into the sort of person his daughter felt she needed to call often and cheer up.

“I went to the coolest concert last night,” she began, and launched into a spirited description of it: the venue, the kids she’d gone with, what they’d done afterward. If she’d stayed in the dorm and played computer games last night, he suspected she would regale him with that story in the same lively, energetic way. It had been like this since Dash had told her about the separation. Chloe’s solicitousness made him feel pathetic—the exact opposite of her intent.

“You know Becca, that girl in my English class? Remember, the one who wants to be a playwright? Her psych teacher flipped out. He’s gone, they’re saying a ‘leave of absence.’ Did I tell you about him? The day they’re doing personality disorders he dresses up for class like a hermaphrodite. Seriously, he had on, like, half a wig, one high heel and one sneaker, one earring—for a
teaching
aid. Can you imagine?”

“Too well.”

“I know—everybody’s talking about it like it’s so bizarre, so unusual, but I told them it happens all the time. Professors going bonkers.”

“Perhaps not
all
the time.”

“No, but it’s not that unusual, right? Even at Mason-Dixon, which is tiny, it happens what, once a year? To somebody?”

“That sounds about right.”

“So how are you doing?”

“My, what an artful segue.” He laughed, genuinely amused, and after a second or two Chloe joined in.

“No, but, you know, I was just asking.”

“I’m fine, sweetheart, I’m just fine. Haven’t even been
tempted
to wear my tricorne to class.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“Or shoot the place up with my musket. How are you?”

“I’m fine, too. Did you get my last move?”

“Indeed. Very bold.” They’d started playing chess via e-mail. Chloe’s idea; another kind, transparent attempt to buoy his spirits. He felt like a social studies project.

“How’s Mom?”

“Haven’t you spoken to her?”

“Yeah. I was just wondering if you had.”

“Not today.”

“Emily said…”

He stifled a sigh. Lately, more and more of Chloe’s sentences started with “Emily said.”

“Emily said her parents probably wouldn’t have split up if she hadn’t gone away to college. Because then they had time. You know, no distractions, they could just concentrate on all the things that were wrong, whereas before, when she was there, she was like the focus, so they didn’t have anything to argue about.” She left a pause, thoughtfully allowing time for him to speculate on whether that was what had happened to him and her mother.

Was it? Had Chloe’s leave-taking merely cleared away the obstruction between them and their incompatibilities? No, Andrew decided. Not for him, anyway. For Dash—who could say?

“Sweetheart,” he shook off some strange, creeping inertia to say, “this is just temporary, you know. Your mother and I are going to be fine.”

“I know.”

“Emily’s parents, whatever they’re going through, it’s got nothing to do with us. And as for us—
that’s
got nothing to do with you. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“You do know that, don’t you?”

“Right, I do.”

“Good. Okay.”

“But Dad?”

“Yes?”

“I could come home. I could go to Maryland or Georgetown, George Washington—I could even go to Mason-Dixon.”

He wavered between laughter and—he didn’t know what. She was kidding, wasn’t she? An embarrassing lump in his throat made it hard to speak for a moment, and after that it took awhile to josh Chloe out of her sweet, crazy offer—which he feared was only half a joke. Even when she said, “Well, think about it, Dad. For you, I could join a gang and flunk all my courses, I could get deeply into drugs, have a baby—then Mom wouldn’t have time to go to the cabin.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Only for you.”

She hung up laughing, but as soon as the line went dead Andrew’s grimacing smile faded to nothing. He stood with his arms limp at his sides, hands heavy as dumbbells.
I’m not well
, he thought.
My daughter feels sorry for me.
He pressed his fingers to the side of his throat, monitoring his pulse.
I’m not doing well.

Dully, he watched the red light on the answering machine flash on and off, on and off. He’d been erasing every new message but that one for the last two weeks, which was foolish, not like him. Time to get rid of it.

He pressed Play.

“Happy New Year! Hi, it’s me—I guess you’re out. We’re here, just Sock and me. We went for a walk and now we’re sleepy, we’re going to bed. Not even going to watch the ball drop. Couple of old poops.”

Pause.

“Well, I hope you’re out somewhere having fun. But not
too
much fun—ha-ha. Okay, I guess that’s it. Love you. Miss you. Happy New Year.”

He’d called her as soon as he got back—from walking Hobbes, not partying—but the conversation had been perfunctory, superfluous, not nearly as satisfying as the message.

He erased it.

Dash was the only adult he knew who genuinely liked New Year’s Eve. He hated it, the mandatory socializing, the antic fun required, the undiscriminating hilarity. The only thing good about it as far as he was concerned was that it marked an anniversary for them. They’d met on New Year’s Eve.

At a horrible party one floor up from his two-room apartment in Foggy Bottom. He’d climbed the stairs at eleven o’clock in the evening, aware of the joke he was about to make of himself, the studious, uncool jerk come to complain about the noise. But he was in a bad way, preparing for the D.C. bar exam while trying to convince himself that a single cell in his body gave a damn about the practice of law. It was one of the worst times of his life; he’d felt as if his head were a test site or a proving ground, the locus of explosions and collisions years in the making.

Dash opened the door. She’d been thinking of leaving, she told him later, because her musician boyfriend had abandoned her to get drunk in one of the bedrooms with his band mates. She had stiff, spiky short hair the color of fake mahogany and a great deal of blue makeup on her eyes. Strange clothes, boots that came up over her knees, a sort of crocheted skullcap on her head. The first thing she did was look him up and down and laugh, as if he were the one in the eccentric costume. A sweet, sunny, surprised kind of laugh, but he was about to take offense anyway when she took him by the wrist, pulled him inside, and kissed him. “Happy New Year. Friend of the bride or friend of the groom?”

“Em…”

It turned out the party givers were celebrating not only New Year’s Eve but also moving in together, but he didn’t know that, and Dash’s question was only the first of many mysteries that would puzzle him that night. The second was why this odd, laughing girl wanted to be with him. But she did, and as soon as he understood that, he forgot his gloomy mission and gave himself up to fate. Or rather, the unique allure of sex and chumminess Dash radiated, at least for him. Then and now.

Awful, thumping music made it impossible to talk even in the kitchen, where she led him to get plastic glasses of someone else’s wine out of the refrigerator. The run-down apartment building had only two virtues, low rents and spacious fire-escape landings overlooking a bit of the distant Potomac River. “Get some air?” Andrew shouted. Dash looked confused until he led her through the packed, stifling living room, out an open window, and onto the fire escape.

“Wow, this is great!” she said, turning in a circle, arms out as if she were blessing the city. “How did you know? Isn’t this
fabulous
?” His first experience of being made to feel as if he’d saved her. She charmed everyone that way, he knew now, an all-inclusive generosity of spirit, but that night he’d thought it was just for him.

On the icy iron stairs under a pinkish sky, they got to know each other. “A
lawyer
?” she repeated, like “A
cannibal
?” when he told her his prospective profession. Her patent horror thrilled him. He laughed for the first time in days. Well, she said, at least he’d find a job right away, since the town was lousy with lawyers. He was aware of casting a pall over the conversation by answering, “Well, as a matter of fact. My father wants me to come into his firm. He’s expecting it.”

One step above him, she put her chin on her fists and leaned close, eyes alight with sympathy. “Don’t you want to?”

“Actually, I don’t want to practice law at all.” She was the first person he’d said that to straight out, no ambivalence.

“What do you want to do?”

“Study history. Teach it at the university level.”

“Then that’s what you should do.”

“Think so?”

“Yes, of course. It’s your life. What do you care what your father thinks?”

He might have dismissed that as naive, except that he’d been arrested from the first moment by a way she had of looking at him as if she already knew him. As if she were waiting for him to catch up, and in the meantime, being with him was exciting and sweetly amusing to her. “Have we met before?” he almost asked. And yet mixed with that was the contrary sense that she was slightly on edge with him, perhaps even on her best behavior because, in fact, she’d never met anyone like him.

“This isn’t really me,” she said at one point, making an artless, looping gesture.

“Who is really you?” he asked.

She grimaced thoughtfully, tapping her front teeth together, and then laughed. “That is an excellent question.”

She told him what she was doing with her life, which dazzled him in its directionlessness, and he told her what he hoped to do with his. “It sounds like I’m having more fun,” she deadpanned, but sympathetically. As much as he was drawn to her, his practical side, the one that could always be relied on to prophesy failure, insisted they would never work, they were too different. Temperaments, interests, outlooks—they had nothing in common, so why begin? Why raise false hopes?