The Duration (2 page)

I looked at Kelly. I thought she'd be crying, but she wasn't. I always thought she'd be crying when she wasn't.

She looked back at me. I was a big child in a small chair, swaddled in sweatshirt, crumbs on my cheeks. She glanced around the coffeehouse. An ominous glance, like something was coming.

Just then my cell phone lit up. A number I didn't recognize, which was good. Might be important.

“Who'd be calling on a Sunday morning?” I asked, in a tone that I hoped sounded both apologetic and frustrated, like all I really wanted to do was to sit there with Kelly and get to the bottom of our relationship.

She wasn't buying it.

I pushed out of the door onto Clarendon and put my hood up against the chill. The Escalade, my getaway truck, was parked down around a distant corner. Through the window I could see Kelly sitting at our table, back to the window, the foam on her latte pristine, the curve in her ponytail embittered. Then she got up, took her coffee, and came through the door, but instead of walking over to me, she turned the other way. I half raised my hands in a what-gives sort of way, but she put her sunglasses on and didn't look over. Somewhere it occurred to me that I was being a dick, that she might not shake it off.

Best not to dwell on it now, I guess.

“Johansson,” I said into the phone, because it sounded badass, at least to me. I watched Kelly head down the block. There was a pause and I adjusted my hood to shield the wind. “Hello?”

Another pause, and then one word, an endearment.

“Guy.”

You ever, maybe at your mom's house, come across a box of stuff from when you were a kid, and there's a little shirt or something inside, and you pick it up and see your name written in the collar? And it just kills you right away?

I came into the county from the east, picking up Route 20 just before it crossed the river and began to climb into the land of the Mahican. I rolled through the outer hill-towns of Russell and Chester and Huntington, one-horse towns, hamlets, through cuts in the ridges and along the icy banks of brooks. Cricks and creeks. Bogs and brooks. Dales and dells and glens and gullies. Too many sticks to shake a stick at. Five dead trees for every ten live ones, most denuded by winter, the pines and spruce left to shiver on the mountainsides like bristles on a boar. Two hours west of Boston, I drove past a plaster deer and a wooden Viking and a 7-foot beaver and an 8-foot bear. What people will do to amuse themselves in the sticks, I guess. Campgrounds. Shack bars. Tires in yards. The road a knotty umbilicus, bending in and out, up and down and around.

Route 20 was the best. You could come in on the Pike, which sagged like a belt on the belly of the Commonwealth, but you'd only save yourself twenty minutes and any sight worth seeing. The Pike was for tourists and long-haulers. It didn't do defiles or climbs or hairpins, just blasted its way through the ridge, through walls of ragged rock where icicles grew blue and busty in the south side shade while the sunny north side stayed bare. Kelly loved those icicles. She was from Los Angeles, where winter was a theory. “Look at that,” she'd say, every time we passed through the ridge. “It's like the one side of the rock can't let go of the other.” Easy, I'd say. It's just the way the sun hits.

It was two weeks since the call, early March, just about the finest time to be in New England if you didn't like color or pleasantries. On this day, a nearly balmy Friday with temps approaching 40°F, fog hung on the crests and I wasn't in my best mood. That's why I was waxing poetic. In my best mood, I might stop in Chester, buy an antler or a jar of blackcurrant jam or some shit like that, just to feel like a man of the people, like I was representing. I might swing through the Gare Outlets and smell the leather at Coach, try on some waders at L.L. Bean. Be an engine of commerce. Pull the Escalade up to the curb outside the Batter's Box in Gare and nod through the windows to the reigning men's fast pitch softball champs. If I was in my best mood, Kelly would be with me, so we'd drive through town and I'd tell my usual stories about the basketball court that used to be next to the pizza place, how I'd balled there every summer evening from ages twelve to eighteen with Jimmer and Unsie and Chick because we couldn't get a good run in Gable, the four of us taking on all comers, all day, day into night, rising to the rock like wolves to the moon. And how whenever I drove by now and saw the dour daycare and haphazard plasticky playground which these days occupied what had once been the scene of some of the great contests of my youth I'd shed a single tear, like the Native American chief in those old Keep America Beautiful commercials. And Kelly would roll her eyes in her usual way, which, if I was in my best mood, I would interpret as condescension undergirded by a deep fondness—even a sense of near-spousal privilege—at bearing witness, again and again, to such florid nostalgia. We were engaged in the domestic equivalent of a John Cougar Mellencamp song. “Those same old stories,” she'd be saying with that look. “I'll be hearing those same old stories over and over again for the rest of my life.”

But Kelly was gone, as it happened, back to California, apparently not as interested in hearing those same old stories over and over again as I'd thought. Her departure, once decided, had been executed with ruthless efficiency—one carry-on, one box shipped from the FedEx down the block. One-way flight purchased with miles, a vague sense that she'd deal with the rest of her stuff later. Or not. Maybe she was making a clean break. Anyway, cab to Logan. I offered to drive her, but she said no, I'm good. Something furious and resolved about her on the sidewalk, waiting, a look like she was done with the Escalade, and whatever it symbolized. Wasn't clear to me, at that point, if she was totally serious. It probably should have been. I waited with her, my arms crossed, dressed for work, trying to affect both emotional availability and harried impatience: I am a busy man, but I am here for you when you want to work this out. I prepared to say something devastating, something stoic but vulnerable. To control the engagement. Stay, or some shit like that. Don't give up on us. But Kelly had her act together, and before I could say anything she'd kissed me hard on the cheek and gotten into the cab, and then she was gone, heading east toward the Ted Williams Tunnel, and I was stuck, freezing on the sidewalk, like damn. That was last Thursday, and I hadn't heard from her since.

So, not my best mood.

I passed the Dream Away, tucked up in a Becket hollow, and hit the cobbled streets of Gare. My mom liked to say there are only three families in the whole of Gare and that each rugged citizen is connected to one of them by some tendril of DNA. I curled through town and up past the lake and the brothel and the resorts at Blantyre and Cranwell. The brothel hadn't been a brothel when I was a kid, least as far as I knew, and Cranwell had been an abandoned prep school. Now they both offered massages, with significantly different price points. I passed the back side of Ventfort Hall, a massive brick chateau abandoned until 1994. We used to walk to middle school past Ventfort but stopped after somebody left a mannequin leaning against an upstairs window—I hope it was a mannequin—either way it scared the shit out of us at 8:15
A.M.
Bypassed downtown Gable because why not, stayed on 20 toward the Knots, took in the glory of the Knotsford-Gable Road, the Luau Hale, the Price Chopper, the abandoned mini-golf.

Abandoned mini-golfs. Man, they're the worst. Almost the worst. Like just a notch above abandoned movie theaters on the depressive scale. Both of them can set you back for hours. You can be feeling pretty good about stuff, and then walk past an abandoned movie theater, its marquee empty or, worse, lettered with noncinema announcements, like “Senior Bingo” or “Rug Sale,” both of which seemed sort of redundant, right? Like, of course it's senior bingo. You could just say “Bingo,” and the seniors would show up. Or just “Rugs,” because what else are you going to be doing with a bunch of rugs? But anyway, you see these sorts of things on an old movie marquee and you just know that somewhere back inside, back past the padlocked doors and the booth with the little half-oval ticket window and the lobby that once smelled like popcorn but now smells like seniors and rugs, there is a big amphitheater where people used to go and dream and watch Star Wars back-to-back-to-back, a three-peat, a trifecta my dad and I pulled off one great Saturday a long time ago, and now that dreamy space is herniated by this street-level infection of bad rugs and bad Nike knock-offs and bad coffee and bad real estate. Abandoned movie theaters suck. The Knots used to have three of them.

Chickie Benecik, he of the untimely phone call, wanted to meet at the corner of Council and Railroad Streets, the edge of what passed in the Knots for the wrong side of the tracks. The Knots was on the way up, relatively speaking, but it still had a ways to go, and parts of the city remained breeding grounds for disaffection and the things that came with it. Some of those parts were just down the hill from the entrance to the Knotsford Medical Center, which is where, I gathered, Chickie had recently been spending time.

I parked the Escalade and engaged the e-brake. Hah! With Kelly on the wing, it was all I was engaging these days. And better for it.

Chick and I had been toddlers on the same short street, only children, quickly inseparable, classmates at Cameron Elementary and altar boys at St. Barney's from nine until twelve, when that stuff with Bill Trivette came out. Unsie and Jimmer didn't come along until later, probably around 1995, when we started playing Catholic Youth Council ball. Our coach was a lunatic named George Harvey. He used to wear these cutoff sweatpants that must've been twenty years old. He had that big old gut and a big ass and he'd hike those bad boys up so tight that when he'd crouch to bark at us in the drills his nuts would press through the thin fabric of his sweats, right in our faces, like a tennis ball that hangs in your garage to tell you where to stop the car. It was hard for us to focus on what he was saying with his nutsack hung out like that, so we fucked up the drills, which infuriated him, and then we had to run sprints. All because he couldn't buy a pair of pants that fit. He was old school. One day after practice, Jimmer suggested we just find a way to snip that shit off, free George Harvey from the tether of his nutsack. Solution! He'd be less angry and we'd be less tired. We were still getting to know Jimmer at the time, and weren't sure if this idea was genius or sociopathic.

But yeah, George Harvey. He kept sticking me at power forward because I was already tall at the time, and I was like yeah I'm tall but I can handle the ball, I'm like Magic Johnson, put me at the point, but he wouldn't because his godson played point. You know Jim Flake? Yeah, he was okay but he wasn't going to get any quicker.

Chickie was our shooter. He had a stroke that was like half poetry and half automation, a grace note practiced ten thousand times. When he got older, in high school, if we could get him the ball in the right spot, I didn't even look for a rebound, I just ran back on defense as soon as he rose up. Chick used to let out a little whoop when he shot, until Coach Harvey made him stop, but he wasn't doing it to be a jerk. It seemed involuntary. Sometimes he whooped whether the ball went in or not. Unsie was our big man until he quit to ski and Jimmer eventually took over the point. Man, we rolled kids. They could not hang. We even rolled the Golacks, up at laconic Misconic. Colonic Misconic. One summer we were playing rec league there and as we're walking into the gym, the Golacks are outside just glaring at us. Ronnie, Robbie, and their little brother Tim-Rick, who was so nice they named him twice, except he wasn't nice at all, he was the meanest fucker we'd ever met. And they didn't like getting whipped. But we whipped them anyway, and then while we were still in the gym, they tried to push our car down an embankment.

I hadn't seen Chick in the eight years since my father's funeral. After high school, my decade had gone college, Dad's heart attack, law school, semi-engagement. Chick, I gathered, had done a couple of different junior colleges, drifting across the Southwest, then two stints with an international aid and education outfit called SmartSeeds. First one was in Guatemala, digging wells and building schools for Guatemalan kids. I got one postcard. Then the South Pacific, some island kingdom near the nuclear testing atolls where everyone glowed and the babies had twelve fingers. Just about as far away from Gable as it was possible to get. Somewhere in there he'd made it back to stand beside me at the wake. Then he was gone again. I hadn't really given him more than a passing thought in years. Just knew he was out there somewhere, doing his Chickie things. Everyone was doing their things. Figured we'd get together someday, reconnect, wouldn't really miss a beat.

Which seemed to be what was happening.

I stood on the corner and looked for him, trying to pick him out of the stragglers on Council Street. I wondered if I was sure I'd recognize him, but of course I would. By the end of high school, he'd developed this slouchy, limpy walk that looked like a strut. The sidewalk was sloped steeply down to the west, and KMC was just one distracted orderly away from sending a gurney rolling into the Housatonic. Up across Council, in the blocks off the rotary, sat St. Eustace, another hive of high school rivals, whose queen bee I'd dated briefly in 2000. She was a cute girl from the east side of the Knots, daughter of a judge, Shaunda Schorenstein or something like that. Shaunda Schoenstein. She'd taken me to her senior formal that year. I was just a junior from Gable, and we got a lot of dirty looks, which I think was what she was hoping for but sort of scared the shit out of me at the time because even though you'd think Catholic schools were full of sweethearts it's just the opposite, but I manned up and held her close and nodded at the dudes I knew from the courts, and later, in the downstairs girls bathroom, she pulled me into a stall and let me get to third with her, which I tried to do in a nice way, and, as I recall, she tried to help me do in a way that would make the experience meaningful for her too, until I think I came in my tuxedo pants. And that was that. High school. What do you want?