Want Not (48 page)

Many of these visitors also asked to go combing through the sale/giveaway pile, for further treasure, which Elwin let them do. More rarely, they’d point to random items in the house and ask if they could have those too. The parents of a six-year-old girl, for instance, went about hushing her, and shooting Elwin embarrassed smiles, when she asked for his television. They’d come for Maura’s old Pottery Barn desk, because the mother—twenty-one at most—was starting community college in the fall, for a nursing degree, and needed a desk for studying, this because she was “so over” waiting tables at the Hackensack Hooters though not nearly as over it, she said, as her furiously tattooed husband/boyfriend was (“She don’t need that scene,” he mumbled). Elwin had listed the desk for fifty dollars but within minutes discounted it to five. “Oh man,” the woman said, elated at the forty-five unexpected bucks headed back into her purse. “You have no idea.” That’s when the little girl asked for the flat-screen. “I’m sorry,” the father said to Elwin, reaching his hands around the girl’s belly and gently pulling her into him, saying to her, “It’s not a
store,
sweetness,” then to Elwin, “We’re saving to get ours fixed. It kind’ve got in the way of a soccer ball.” Elwin looked at the TV and then the little girl, who had doubtless been in league with that soccer ball, and then back to the TV. Why not? He rarely watched it, and when he did it was usually to give his eyes something to do while his mouth dispatched half portions of junk food. And hadn’t Maura picked it out? It qualified, then. “Take it,” he told the couple, who glanced at one another in wary astonishment, the father’s hands tightening against the girl’s round belly. “Seriously?” the girl asked. “Seriously,” said Santa Elwin. The father shook his hand so hard and for so long that for the remainder of the evening Elwin worried his wrist was sprained. “You
really
have no idea,” the woman kept saying, and when the family pulled out of the driveway in their mufflerless Camry, Elwin heard the parents ordering the girl to wave, which she did, as big white bursts of reflected sunset went bouncing off the TV propped sideways in the backseat beside her. Elwin lingered on the porch until the sputtering of their car dissolved into the usual traffic thrum, feeling strangely lighter and more vibrant, as when emerging from a dream, the tangerine sky above Morristown streaked with red-velvet clouds, a postcard scene from a place no one ever sent postcards. Then Christopher came in from the garage, and after discovering what’d become of the TV, threw a seething fit during which he threatened to move out—to where he didn’t know, just
the fuck OUT.

Inside Elwin, however, something had clicked. An odd squirt of dopamine, maybe, or perhaps something deeper: a mild eureka of the heart. With every sale or gift he could feel his broken life dematerializing, its old scarred edifice crumbling, the invited looters fleeing with its junked remnants, and with that feeling came astonishing relief. These were not insignificant objects, however trivial they sometimes appeared as they were carted off and slipped into backseats and car trunks. They were totems, idols, talismans, artifacts, witnesses, volatile with memory and meaning, each one a marker on a trail that’d once seemed so promising but had petered into a dead end.

He thought of all the self-help and diet books he’d devoured in the last year, with their consistent hectoring that for positive change to occur, it had to originate
inside.
Yet here was the obverse: the outside changing, and the inside following giddily along. Was this how Maura had felt, after abandoning the 340 pounds of dead weight in her own life (him)? The parallels were too coarse, he decided, but still. If such minor episodes of divestment felt this good, he thought—then how much better would
more
feel? The example of the little girl and the TV said
very.

The next person to arrive at his front door—a middle-aged woman wearing denim shorts and a Pipefitters Local 274 t-shirt, come to pick up a hallway mirror—put her hand to her chest when Elwin told her to take almost anything she wanted. He watched her go wandering the house dumbstruck, then overheard her in the living room saying into her phone, “Honey? Can you borrow Bill’s truck and meet me in Morristown? Right away, yeah.” This time, when Christopher came in from the garage, he surveyed the denuded living room, which earlier that day had housed a couch and two leather chairs, and announced he was off to McGuinn’s, because at the bar, he said, unlike here, there were places to sit down. “Great idea,” said Elwin, deaf to the acid curdling Christopher’s tone. “Just give me a minute to change my shirt.”

It was that night at the bar that Elwin heard from Sharon, while checking email on his BlackBerry during one of Christopher’s bathroom breaks.
Hey Big,
she wrote.
Turns out I *will* be in NYC next week (meeting with the Wall St. suits about that commission, which I should pretend to be ambivalent about but won’t). Would it be a gruesome imposition for me to venture out to NJ to see some Elwin? Intentions are work and pleasure. We need to chop the legalese outta that statement text. And I sho could stand to see a friendly face in this mean ol blues song of a world. xo Sharon.
He read it twice, the first time smiling and the second time grunting and finally frowning, and laid the BlackBerry on the bar when Christopher swung back onto the barstool beside him, trailing a muskratty odor freshly purchased from the coin-op cologne dispenser in the bathroom.

Sharon’s email was not entirely unexpected—she’d broached the idea of a visit the month before, when she and Elwin were together at the panel meeting, though in that loosey-goosey, noncommittal way people tended to plan things nowadays, leading Elwin to think it wouldn’t happen. (A dismaying number of Elwin’s friendships had degraded down to staggered email chains in which a friend suggested dinner and then, when Elwin asked when, disappeared for months, as though the friend were victim to repeat kidnappings—or as though the asking was all, the answer gratuitous.)

Nor was Sharon’s
xo
tone any surprise: Over the course of all the meetings they’d developed a chumminess—that was the safe and vaguely rotund word Elwin would use—that was one part political alliance (the Markers panel had broken into two factions, which could be crudely called the Torrancians and the anti-Torrancians, or the optimists and the pessimists) and three parts something else. Whatever the component parts of chumminess were, he supposed. These latter parts had involved at least four late-night talking sessions—at grimly overlit hotel bars, drinks sweating onto Formica boothtops—during which Sharon had unfurled her own broken-life story: the artist husband who’d ditched her for a younger woman (“a student of his,” she’d explained, adding, “why does it hurt so much more when it’s a cliché?”), the daughter she’d raised alone who was now at USC on a film scholarship, the way you woke up in the middle of the night and found yourself sitting on the edge of the bed wondering if it would’ve all been different had you played by the rules and then wondering if maybe you actually
had
played by the rules, whatever the rules even were, but there you were regardless, adrift and unwanted, perched on the edge of the mattress at 3
A.M.
with your cast-off misfit love. She was one of those divorcées—Elwin supposed he’d be counting himself as one, too—whose life had been knocked off its axis midway through, and who couldn’t help viewing their lives through the binary of
before
and
after.
Nevermind that she’d achieved renown as a sculptor, and carved for herself what sounded like a rustically idyllic existence on the fringes of Taos (straw-bale house, one hundred percent solar-power generation, chickens and goats, bookish desert solitude), and raised a daughter whom she couldn’t talk about without breaking into what she called her “dumb proud hayseed grin,” no. She still compressed the story of her
after
life into three words: “I’ve muddled through.”

Here was the danger or downside of romantic idealism, she and Elwin finally decided, two drinks later. “You shoot for the moon,” he said, “but when you don’t make it . . .”

“You can’t bear to look at the moon ever again, right?” she said, but not quite to him—to the ice cubes melting at the bottom of her glass, or maybe whomever she saw reflected there.

No, the surprise, for Elwin, was how
he
felt at receiving the email: terrified. But of what? He sat there chewing his own melted ice while Christopher quizzed the bartendress on whether women could really squirt the way they did on the internet. Terrified of what, he asked himself again, sifting his thoughts: of the chumminess ripening into something warmer, sure. But also of it not. Terrified because the former carried the power to validate Maura’s leaving by proving that, yes, these feelings of ours are all transferable, and that maybe the moon was never the right destination to begin with, because maybe we were all just atoms bouncing into one another in the black swirl of space, bound and released by the ebb and flow of something like static electricity, or like items in the marketplace, bought and used and disposed of and then if we’re lucky, salvaged and reused. But terrified, too, that the latter—fixed chumminess—might also validate Maura’s leaving, by exposing and maybe confirming once and for all his big fat undesirability. His essential not-enoughness, as Maura had so ungently put it. In the McGuinn’s bathroom he splashed his face with cold water and assessed himself in the smudgy mirror, his face framed by angry-looking stickers for punk bands and skateboards. Wet like that, and cast in the snotty green glow of the fluorescent bathroom light, he looked like a bullfrog. The bullfrog said to him:
Just tell her you’re sorry, but that you’re out of town that week.
When a guy came barging into the bathroom he found Elwin nodding so deeply to the mirror that he immediately backed out with apologies.

The spooked bullfrog, however, was no match for Christopher and the bartender, whose name was Kelly, and who had a semi-agreeable habit of pouring shots of Jameson whether they’d been ordered or not. In a chemically induced semi-agreeable moment, Elwin showed the email to Christopher who passed it to Kelly who Googled up a photo of Sharon from her website and proclaimed her “smokin,” just as the Budweiser pirate had deemed the Jeep. “So tell me what’s the issue here?” she asked.

“Doc ain’t sure,” said Christopher, which was surprisingly incisive, because Elwin didn’t recall admitting he was unsure.

Kelly scowled as she passed Elwin back his phone. “Ain’t sure of what?”

“Anything,” said Doc, not nearly as comically as he’d intended.

“Miss ‘XO’ here, on the email—is that it?” she said. Was it the Irish whiskey, or had everyone in his vicinity developed incisive superpowers? Was he the only one stumped by the riddle of his life? “’Cause the answer’s yes, Mr. Big.”

So that’s what he wrote her,
yes,
tapping it out on the BlackBerry while Christopher steered the conversation back to other aspects of womanhood he’d learned from the internet, Kelly vigorously rolling her eyes as she went about debunking them one by one.
The state of New Jersey welcomes you for as long as you’d care to stay.
Elwin hitting
send
was celebratory cause for another round of Jameson shots, which this time he refused, passing the shot glass down to Christopher. “So you’re obviously okay with sleeping on the couch for a night or two?” Elwin asked him. Christopher winced, wiping the whiskey residue off his lips with the back of his hand. “Doc,” he said, “that chick ain’t flying ten thousand miles from New Mexico to park herself in a guest room.”

So his incisiveness had been a one-off. Elwin said, “Here’s another lesson about women for you,” prompting Kelly, who’d been leading this 101-level class, to take three steps backwards while shaking a cocktail, and lean in for a listen. “You don’t ever make assumptions.”

“Truth,” Kelly said.

Cornered, Christopher held up his hands. “Awright. Fine. But here’s the thing, Doc.” A grin hijacked his face. “You gave away the fucking
couch
today.”

“Oh shit,” Elwin said.

So he shifted Sharon’s visit down the Shore, to a short-term three-bedroom rental he found on Brigantine Beach, near Atlantic City. For one thing, Christopher had nowhere else to go during her stay—the idea of him sleeping out in a backyard tent went belly-up when Elwin remembered he’d sold his tents—and, for another, the house was in an accelerating and conceivably disturbing state of undress, as the Craigslisters went ransacking it daily. Hence the Shore. Per Elwin’s invitation, Christopher would be coming along: With sobriety returned the murky terror, and Elwin saw Christopher as a sort of buffer, a kind of funhouse version of a chaperone, or a preemptive excuse if things went awry. The kid was ecstatic: The only times he’d been down the Shore were as a boy, when Big Jerry forced his twins to guard the baitpail while he went wading into the crowded surf at Sandy Hook with a hangover and a Beefstick surfcasting rod, and once as a high schooler, when he’d gotten into a boardwalk brawl at Wildwood with “some Bergen County assholes” who’d knocked his ice cream cone to the ground. He was so ecstatic, in fact, that he disappeared into the garage for two straight days and nights, with instructions for Elwin to (a) borrow his truck to get back and forth to Marasmus State, and (b) not peek through the garage windows for any reason. Though sacked with another kind of terror, imagining or rather failing to imagine (because he’d already bumped the limits of his automotive nightmare-vision) what fresh hell his Jeep was being subjected to, Elwin obeyed—almost thankful for the comparative subtlety of Christopher’s pickup with its raft of plastic skulls strung from the rearview mirror and its rear-window decal of a boy peeing on the Ford logo.

The morning of their departure, after Elwin had carted all his luggage and medicines and coolers to the porch, Christopher led him out to the garage for the unveiling. “You ready?” Christopher asked, and like a defendant girding himself for his jury sentence Elwin pursed his lips and nodded. Christopher rolled up the garage door, with its metallic racket for a drumroll, and there she was: Elwin’s formerly deer-mangled Jeep Cherokee, looking like no Jeep Cherokee he’d ever seen or wanted to see. The polished-everywhere chrome shone like a wintry sun: the 22-inch chrome wheels, the chrome tube bumper, foglights, that damn chrome gas cap. Underbody LED lights threw a blue disco glow upward, to where Christopher had festooned the body with flame decals, long orange and yellow licks extending all the way to the rear. The way the Jeep was waxed and buffed and impossibly gleaming called to mind a bodybuilder flexing onstage—even the interior, which Christopher opened the door for him to see, bore an immaculate shine. “I don’t know what to say,” said Elwin. The backseat, he noted, was draped in a beige hammock; Christopher had been waiting for his puzzled expression. “That’s for Bologna,” he said. “Some kind of microfiber shit. To keep his hair off the seats. ’Sposed to be comfortable for him, too.” At which point Elwin felt something sloshing inside him: revulsion mixing with affection. It was laughably appalling, and somehow the kindest gesture anyone had extended him in years.