Townie (34 page)

Pop’s friend was talking about Miles Davis now and we were driving through Monument Square, a new restaurant where I had nearly beaten a boy to death. My father was driving and he could keep driving. Then we were on the Basilere Bridge over the Merrimack River, and as I watched the dark water flow east past the concrete floodwall and Captain Chris’s Restaurant and the boxboard factory on the opposite bank, there was this recognition of movement, that like the currents below I was being pulled from what I had known to what I did not yet know, that for now I was suspended between two worlds.

IN MAY
I finished writing a short story. It was set in Louisiana and was about a young man caring for his ailing grandmother. Every afternoon the grandmother’s elderly friend brings fresh blackberries she’s picked and the grandson takes them and puts them with the rest, but he’s getting tired of baking blackberry cobbler and blackberry pie and blackberry bread and muffins, and he’s about to throw them all out when one afternoon, as he’s getting ready to serve the women coffee, he overhears the friend crying and telling his grandmother how unhappy she is because she lives with her son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren in their small house and she doesn’t want to be a burden, doesn’t want to be any trouble, and that’s why she leaves the house every day with her empty coffee can to pick blackberries. But now the season’s over, she weeps, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself anymore. In the final scene, the grandson decides to keep all the blackberries she’s picked, and he bakes for days.

It was an overwritten, sentimental story, something I wouldn’t know till months had passed after finishing it. But as I wrote that last line my heart was thumping against my sternum and my mouth was dry and I felt pulled along by something larger than I was, something not in me but in this story that had come out of me.

It was a Saturday afternoon, warm enough I didn’t need a jacket. I grabbed my workout clothes and left my apartment. The inside of my car smelled like sawdust and the leather of my carpentry apron on the backseat. For a few miles the day was too bright and real and I blinked at it from the dream I’d cast myself in with the two old ladies and the young man and all those blackberries. Then I was on the back roads heading west. Instead of playing the radio, hunting for that one good song, I drove along in silence. On both sides of the road were woods, but today, for the first time, I saw them as individual trees, each one different from the one beside it or in front of it or behind it. One was as bent with age and weight as an old man, another as thin and straight as a young girl, one pine, the other maple or elm or oak, and the sun seemed to shine on each sprouting leaf, on each needle, on the black telephone lines sweeping from pole to pole, on the veined creosote at their bases, on each pebble at the side of the road, each broken piece of asphalt, each diamond of broken glass from a smashed bottle or cracked mirror or discarded compact from a woman I would never meet. And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I’d lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing—even writing badly—had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay
me
, I would have to keep writing.

SOMETIME LATER
I gave Pop and Peggy a copy of my story, “Blackberries.” Pop read it first, then Peggy. She said, “Writing’s hard, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

Pop said the story started to make him feel something. Then he said, “I had a hunch you were going to do this.”

“What?”

“Write.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know, but I did.”

I nodded again. There was a change in the air, a shift in winds, and I wasn’t sure any of this was a good thing.

“You should tend bar.”

“Why?”

“It’s a great job for a writer. You can write in the morning and work at night.”

But I wasn’t a writer. He was a writer. I didn’t want to be a writer. I just knew I had to
write
.

“It’s a good job for a graduate student, too. You’ll need some pocket money working on that Ph.D.”

It was strange to hear him offering such fatherly advice, but I knew he was right and I took it.

That summer he paid my way to the American Academy of Bartending in South Boston. It was in the same neighborhoods where my sister was raped, but I felt at home among the row houses and tin-sided apartment buildings, the overflowing dumpster beside the pool hall across from the barroom and sub shop and gas station where a black man in a greasy winter coat stood all day under the sun beside the shopping cart that held his life.

The bartending school was on the second floor above an Italian grocery and an Irish pub. It was a long damp room, and it held four bars the students were supposed to practice on. The carpet was a flattened orange shag, the walls fake white paneling between smudged windows looking out over the street. The instructor was from the same generation as Tony Pavone. He had a thick Dorchester accent and wore glasses with black frames, his graying hair combed back with Vitalis. During class, he wore a white shirt and a black bow tie and vest, its worn hem rubbing along the belt of his pants as he talked with his hands. He was from a time and place I knew nothing about, and over the next few days he taught five or six of us how to mix martinis and Manhattans, Brandy Alexanders, sidecars, and Rob Roys. He taught us how to open bottles of wine and how to pull a draft off the tap. He suggested we keep a lighter in our pocket in case a customer wanted to smoke, and he gave us a lecture on doing things right. Especially when it came to watching the till.

“You people are the money handlers for the whole operation, you understand? So be honest and don’t tell no jokes when you’re makin’ change, all right?”

He made me think of resorts and casinos, all-night joints where Cadillac convertibles were parked under palm trees in a soft blue light. He made me think vaguely of organized crime.

At the end of the week I had my certificate proclaiming me a successful graduate of the American Academy of Bartending. That same week Trevor D. handed me my last check. We were standing in the sunlit yard of the widow’s small home, larger now, something I’d always wondered about, this need of hers to expand when her life had gotten smaller and simpler, so why enlarge a house for only one?

“No jobs coming up, mate. I’ll try to keep your brother working, but you don’t have a kid so good luck to you.” He shook my hand, his larger and more callused. I thanked him for all I’d begun to learn and drove away, the sun still high above the telephone lines and rooftops and trees. I’d started another story, this one set in New Hampshire and told from the point of view of a teenage girl whose family was moving when she didn’t want to. She smoked a lot, often late at night among packed boxes in the dark living room, her family asleep upstairs. In the last writing session, she was drawing deeply on her Kool, its tip a bright ember she was thinking of putting to dry cardboard.

Rent was due and there was only a month left before I was to drive west for studies I was no longer pulled toward, so I left my apartment in Lynn and moved in with Pop, Peggy, Cadence, and Nicole. He gave me the spare room on the first floor, the same one he and I had broken into when he lived here with his second wife, Lorraine leaning against the doorframe in her nightgown, smoking, waiting for us. Except for those two weeks between women when he’d stayed with us on Columbia Park and slept in my room, I hadn’t lived in the same space with him since I was a boy in the woods of New Hampshire. It was strange to share a house with him; I felt like some hovering ghost of the boy I had been.

Soon enough I owned a black vest and bow tie, a white shirt and black nylon pants and black shoes, all of which I’d bought in pieces in strip malls. I’d gotten a bartending job working for a small catering company who did private parties for people wealthy enough to cater parties. They were in Boston in neighborhoods where surgeons and bankers and corporate executives lived. Except for some of the bigger houses in Bradford, I had never even seen homes this big and comfortable. They were on wide quiet streets, the unbroken sidewalks shaded by maples and oaks, and many of the houses were behind tall walls of stone and thick green hedges ten feet high. Some had security gates, and my boss—a funny and warm man going bald at thirty-five who referred to himself as a bisexual Jew—would get out of the van and announce us into an intercom. A metal gate would slide open and we’d be directed to a service area, the place where I learned the cleaning people parked, the cook or nanny, the pool men, the gardener, and any tradesmen who’d come to work on the house.

It was a dry August and many of the parties were outside under cream-colored tents. We’d carry our bins of food and bags of ice and kegs of beer and cases of wine and liquor out to lawns that usually held a clay tennis court, a pool and pool house, a lush rose garden alongside hedges like those hiding the walls from the street. There would be tables set up under white linens, votive candles floating in glass bowls of water. I’d set up my bar in a corner of the tent or up on a veranda, and while I cut limes into wedges, as I emptied jars of olives and pearl onions and maraschino cherries into their respective dishes, as I cored lemons and sliced the skins into twists, I took in how the owners were usually polite enough but spoke to us all in the clipped and patronizing tones reserved for children or the mentally impaired. It was the same tone I would hear from owners on construction sites, the surprise the widow had shown when Jeb first saw her piano and mentioned he was a classical guitarist. She smiled and looked him up and down, his carpenter’s apron and framing hammer hanging against paint-splattered jeans with the hole in one knee, his scuffed work boots, the two days of whiskers on his cheeks and chin. She clearly did not believe him, something which didn’t seem to bother him the way it was bothering me, and I was glad he began to describe the piece he was teaching himself, something by J. S. Bach, and he was going on long enough about it her face began to soften, and a light came into her eyes that looked less like revelation and more like guilt.

At one function, I had set up my bar in a high-ceilinged room. There was gleaming furniture laid out on Oriental carpets, and the walls were a raised-panel oak I was admiring, waiting for the party to begin, when a woman five or six years older than I came up to the bar and stared at me. She was lovely, her blonde hair pulled up in a twist, her clavicle tanned above a black cocktail dress. She said, “Aren’t you Andre Dubus’s son?”

“Yeah, how’d you know that?”

“I work at Godine, your father’s publisher.”

I did not remember meeting her or any of Pop’s publishers, but a summer before there’d been a cookout at Pop’s house, a few people there from Boston. Maybe it was then. An older man stepped up beside her. He was tall and wore a double-breasted blue suit, the room filling with guests behind him. She smiled up at him and was about to say something, but he put his hand on her elbow and ordered from me a Glenfiddich on the rocks.

While I poured it, she said, “Dad, this is Andre. His father is with us at Godine.”

He gave me the once-over in my barman’s uniform. “What is he, a printer?”

“No, Dad, his father is one of our
authors
, one of the best short story writers in the country.”

“Oh.” He took me in again, a slight shrug in his shoulders, this young man before him getting paid to be subservient. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too, sir.”

His daughter apologized for her father, but I was already busy taking orders from polite men and women in summer-weight suits and cocktail dresses, clothes my mother and father had never owned or worn. These were cheerful people in their forties, fifties, and sixties, so many of them fit-looking and tanned, flashy watches on the men’s wrists, delicate bracelets of gold or silver or turquoise and silver on the women’s, their earrings glittering, their teeth as straight and white as the rich girls I’d known at Bradford College, and as pleasant as they were to each other and to me, it was clear I was being put in the same category as all the other people in their lives who performed services for them that made them feel more comfortable, well-traveled, well-fed, well-housed, and soothed, services they paid for with money the rest of us would never know. And it was like waking from a dream of rain to find yourself wet and getting wetter.

But the outrage I’d had in Austin was largely gone; all night long I saw these people not as a class, but as individual men and women. There were no woods, only trees.

These people threw a lot of parties, too: for a judge retiring from the bench; for a daughter or son going off to a job in some city; for weddings and engagements; to celebrate a promotion; or—and there were many of these—just to have a party, as if the summer itself was being celebrated.

And what was wrong with that? What was wrong with taking your money and spending it on a good time?

There was the twenty-fifth reunion of lawyers who had all gone to Harvard Law School, an institution I had never heard of until I found myself standing in my tie and vest behind an outdoor bar not far from a hot tub and swimming pool where a dozen men stood around drinking and laughing and shooting the shit. Most of them were in shorts and Bermuda shirts, and they all wore a heavy brass graduation ring on the ring finger of their right hands. Some were tanned and handsome, their temples beginning to gray, a few others pale and plump and bald, like they’d spent their entire lives sitting behind a desk in a suit in a dim office. But they seemed happy to me, or at least happy to be among one another again, each of them a rich lawyer. Behind them, their wives swam in the pool or soaked in the hot tub or sat in the shade of massive umbrellas at glass tables sipping from glasses of wine I’d poured for them.

The men drank beer or scotch on the rocks or vodka tonics I would squeeze a wedge of lime into, and one of the handsome ones, the host who owned the massive house beside us, he turned to one of the portly ones and said, “You hear about Rodney?”