The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (4 page)

In the weeks that follow, Duncan gives him a set of keys to the station wagon. They shop together for plywood and two-by-fours, which they take to a neighbor’s garage. Duncan is a patient teacher. He brings AJ iced tea and makes him wear protective goggles. He doesn’t mind when AJ confuses measurements or makes a cut so ugly it has to be redone. AJ learns to maneuver a circular saw. He hammers nails, drives screws. He builds two ramps. They go together in sections. He paints them a brick color to match the house. When he shakes Duncan’s hand, it does not feel like a hand but a soft bag holding something lighter than bones—pretzels or Pixy Stix.

He thinks he will finally see Greta when he installs the ramps, but Duncan is taking his family out of town.

“Are you good with this?” he asks. “Should I hire someone to help you?”

AJ declines the offer. The sections fit together like the plastic connecting blocks he played with as a boy. He has retrieved these blocks from his closet and built a house much like Duncan’s, adding plastic ramps to the steps.

“Keep track of your time,” Duncan tells him.

AJ spends the morning loading the sections into the back of the station wagon and unloading them down the street. The sections are heavy and difficult to maneuver. One set is for the front, another for the back. He has visited this house to clean the gutters, shovel snow, put up storm windows. He has never seen any of the family but Duncan, yet he feels connected to the place—the shape of the lawn, the rumpled roots of the sycamore in the backyard, the handprints in the sidewalk out front. These shapes and sites put him at ease, but the sections of the ramp fail to align. AJ drives to a pay phone to call his father. When he gets no answer, he calls Tom Stewart.

“I’m not much of a carpenter,” he warns.

It takes them an hour to figure out the problem. AJ confused a section meant for the back with one meant for the front. A simple problem, but he has nailed the sections together. It becomes a complicated setback. They do not finish until after dark and admire their work by flashlight.

“These are well built,” Tom Stewart says, kneeling to knock on the lumber.

“The guy they’re for designed them,” AJ explains. “I just followed directions, and I messed up a lot even then.”

“That’s all right,” Tom Stewart says. “These are good ramps and you built them.”

“I guess I did build them,” AJ says, surprised somehow by this information.

Headlights appear on the street and pull up to the driveway.

“They’re not supposed to see me,” AJ says.

They climb into Tom Stewart’s truck and drive away.

Greta and Andrew Holzman are stationed at the front door. He offers her a tired smile. “Why don’t you give me your number?”

“I’m staying here,” she says. “But I only have the weekend, and I want to spend it with Ellen. Then I’ll be in cold, cold Illinois, while you’ll be in warm, warm Florida.”

The door is open, which lets in the smell of the outside world: grass and trees and the soft, soporific southern air. The night is fully dark now, and she is tired.

He says, “Hot and cold don’t mix?”

“They become something terribly bland,” she says, “or a tornado.”

He places his hands on her hips. She leans in and lets him kiss her. It carries a tiny charge. She glances at Ellen, who is slow dancing with the dark little man.

“Did you know about those two?” she asks.

Andrew nods. “Elle tells me everything.”

Greta’s understanding of the night is shifting. She can almost feel the movement. She doesn’t know what to think, except she doesn’t want to be alone with Ellen and her strange partner. She initiates a second kiss and lets Andrew press his body against hers.

“I could be persuaded to stay.” He wags the hand with the cast. “This doesn’t prevent me from doing anything.”

“What do you know that I don’t?” she asks. “You can start with that guy’s name.”

“It’s Stan. He’s in the process of leaving his wife. She was at the party. Maybe tonight was it, you know, the parting.”

“That girl who was the bartender—”

“Stan’s daughter.”

“Jesus,”
Greta says. “I thought Ellen was after you.”

“Me?” Andrew makes a face. “Didn’t you wonder why Penny left her own party to come here? The wife is her best friend.”

This talk makes her dizzy. She clings to him while she works to fit the pieces together. Penny hired Stan’s daughter to tend the bar, which was meant to stop him from attending to his mistress. Greta understands that she misjudged Penny. She left the party to stop Stan from seeing Ellen, to shame him. The night makes sense, just not the kind of sense she expected. It’s Penny and the little man’s wife who are friends, not she and Ellen.

“I’m trying like hell to get your attention,” Andrew says. “What do I need to do?”

“Love me,” she answers. “Give up Florida and move to Chicago. Buy snow boots and earmuffs. Live for me and me alone.”

“Hmm,” he says.

“You asked.”

“What the hell. Let’s do it.”

She expects him to laugh but he doesn’t. “You’re almost serious.”

“I turn fifty next month.” He looks at his watch as if it keeps track of his age. “I was married once, but that was done with years ago. And you look like…”

“I’m the wild friend from out of town.”

“When I jumped out the window, it was at my daughter’s house,” he says. “She has a drug problem. I had to let her know what she was doing to all of us.”

“A stunt,” Greta says, and it sounds like self-accusation. She realizes why Ellen said she was no stranger to stunts. All those things she invented to prolong their friendship. She mentioned a boy—one of the tree men—who began appearing on her street, staring from his bicycle at their house. She had the vanity to think he was there to catch a glimpse of her, but she discovered a canceled check to
A.Jack
written in Duncan’s nearly illegible hand. Duncan was using him to do the chores he could no longer do himself. The kid had built the ramps she had yet to remove.

Then Greta used the boy, too. She’d only told Ellen that she kissed him, but that was bad enough. There was the real stunt, telling such a lie.

“I left my husband when he was dying,” she tells Andrew. “I left him because he had chosen
not
to die, and I couldn’t face it. When there seemed no end to it, I couldn’t continue.”

Andrew nods without comment. He has no interest in judging her. He behaves as if the person she’s describing no longer exists, as if by admitting her bad behavior she erases it. She knows this is not true. All of the people she has been do not merely trail her like a wedding train but envelop her like the layers of an elaborate gown she can never entirely shed.

The player changes discs. Motown is back. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell have tracked her down. “Ain’t no mountain high enough,” they claim, “ain’t no valley low…”

“I’m so weary of this music. Why can’t we take the pledge and move on?”

“Hey girl, I’m with you.” It’s Ellen. She and Stan join them at the door. They’re holding hands. He wipes at his nose with his sleeve. “I’ll take the pledge,” Ellen says as she marches to the stereo. The music dies. “Open the door,” she calls, but it’s already open.

They step aside and she flings the CD, Frisbee style, into the yard. The silver disc catches the moonlight as it flies across the short stretch of grass, gleaming as it strikes a parked car. The door to the car opens. The dome light illuminates the girl with the ponytail who tended bar. Beside her sits another woman.

“I have to go,” Stan says.

“Close it,” Greta says as soon as Stan passes through. “Don’t watch.”

Duncan takes Greta dancing as Ellen advised. Ellen and Theo come along as Ellen promised.

Except for the stage, where a band is immersed in golden light, the bar is dimly lit. Duncan keeps time with his wife on the crowded dance floor. He is worried that he will fall and give away his condition, and yet he’s enjoying himself. Greta used to make fun of his dancing when they were dating. “How can a musician have no rhythm?” she’d say. The memory adds to his pleasure. He loves the way his wife dances, the large and fine movements of her body, even her mouth, puckering and grimacing with the beat. He stomps a little to make his awkward shuffle seem intentional, but it leaves him unstable. Greta bumps him as she does a spin, and his body tips like a great timber.

Yet he doesn’t fall. Theo and Ellen have been dancing beside them all night. Theo’s hands grip him, balance him, and let him go. Greta doesn’t see a thing.

He understands he will not dance again. This is his last night for dancing. When the song ends, Theo pretends to be tired and takes his arm.

“You gals dance together,” Theo says. “We want to drink.”

Theo was the first to know. He noticed something in Duncan’s golf swing, convinced him to see a doctor. Probably he told Ellen right away. What else would explain her reaction at the house? It can be hard not to tell your wife everything. Immediately he amends the thought. Some things are easier not to say.

They sit beside each other at the table, drinking and watching their wives. When the band announces its last number, Duncan is drunk enough to ask. He takes Theo by the arm.

“When did you tell Ellen about me?”

Theo sighs and shakes his head wearily. “I can’t keep a damn thing from her.”

Duncan smiles, nods. He has another question. It coils in his mouth, ready to spring out. The transfer to Florida was so abrupt, their decision to move such a surprise. He thinks it’s his illness that made up their minds. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to research the disease, how it dominates the lives around it, all the work it takes to care for a human who can no longer move. Families fall apart. Friendships dissolve.

He holds to Theo’s arm, but he does not speak. To ask is to accuse. He prefers to believe in their friendship. He takes a long drink of beer and searches the dance floor again for his wife. He’s determined not to let his illness destroy his family. Already he’s hired a kid to do chores, build ramps. The beer is still cold and just bitter enough. His wife dances into view. She’s talking with Ellen even as they flit and shake to the music. His life swirls deliciously inside him, like the smoke in the stage lights. He merely has to keep one step ahead of the disease. That’s all.

How hard can that be?

On the day of Greta’s return flight, the Florida sky opens and rain pummels Ellen’s car. They leave the house hours early. Neither wants her to be late. Ellen drives incautiously, skating over street ponds, passing on the freeway ramp. But traffic grows thick and they come to a standstill.

“There must be an accident,” Ellen says.

“It was smart to leave early,” Greta agrees.

Since the party, Ellen has had nothing to do with her. She stayed in bed on Saturday morning, claiming a hangover. Yet when Greta got out of the shower, she was gone. A note explained that she was at the gym. She didn’t return until lunchtime and arrived with friends. She announced in front of the others that Andrew had invited Greta to dinner. “I accepted for you,” she said casually. Greta took the hint. She had dinner with Andrew and spent the night at his apartment. A siren sounds. A patrol car passes them on the shoulder.

“Andrew is really taken with you,” Ellen says.

“He’s nice,” Greta replies.

Andrew had grilled tuna on his balcony and lit candles in the bedroom. The sex wasn’t entirely satisfactory, but she enjoyed seeing his apartment. She asked him why Ellen wanted to hurt her, but he did not attempt an answer. She told him about Duncan, how he’d had rages near the end, accusing her of intentionally hurting him when she got him dressed or took him to the toilet. They went to a counselor, but they could not make the therapist understand how they felt. He used words like
codependency and enabling,
feeble words that did no justice to the tragedy of their lives. Greta had wished Ellen and Theo could be with them. Why shouldn’t friends go to therapy to save their happiness? But she cannot imagine sitting with Ellen and talking to a therapist. Instead, she sees them in Chicago with their husbands and children, bundled for winter, chatting about their lives.

When the reverberation of the siren dies out, there’s only the sound of the rain.

Ellen says, “I don’t care what you think of me.” Her voice is soft, almost apologetic. She grips the steering wheel with both hands, her knuckles turning white. “How many more chances will I have?”

“I’m not judging you,” Greta says.

“You met him. You could see it. He’s a cut above.”

As far as Greta could tell, Stan was as ordinary as they came.

“People
die
for love,” Ellen says. “They fight wars for love. So what if I’m willing to break up a marriage for it?”

“Why didn’t you just tell me? Why the big story about Andrew?”

“You made out all right there,” Ellen says. “You wound up pretty entertained by that little ruse.”

“Oh, please stop.”

They sit in silence. Ellen turns on the radio. An oldies station, the Turtles:
I can’t see me lovin’ nobody but
—Greta switches it off. The traffic begins to move.

Finally Ellen says, “I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t have you throwing yourself at him.”

“God
damn
you,” Greta says. “I hate you, you know. I really do.”

One evening, near the end of Duncan’s truncated life, he lets it slip that he told Ellen first. Maybe he means to hurt Greta with it. Maybe he wants to turn her against her friend.

“She wouldn’t let me tell you until she’d gone south.” He’s hard to understand, his mouth no longer fully under his control, the muscles in his body burning out one at a time. The disease encourages them to be petty, to attend to minutiae, anything to avoid the havoc of misfiring nerves, the husk of his body. It doesn’t help that their sleep is ruined. Greta has to get up if he needs to pee or merely turn on his side. She has to feed him and watch him chew. Twice a day she pours a protein drink into a tube surgically connected to his stomach. He says, “She told me to take you out while I could still dance.”