I Thought You Were Dead (29 page)

Across the street he saw, through his binoculars, a young father, half his age, walking hand in hand with his daughter, dressed in a one-piece pink snowsuit. Paul felt envious. What was it Hamlet said? “The readiness is all.” Paul was shocked to realize he'd just remembered something his college English teacher had said, but it was bound to happen sooner or later.

He typed:

He spell-checked his work, gave a quick, skipping read-through of what he'd done, and realized, somewhat to his surprise, that he was finished with the book. He needed to send a copy to his agent for his comments, and there would be revisions forthcoming, but for now, he was done. It was good timing, a good feeling to end the year on. He saved a copy of the manuscript to a floppy drive, attached the file to an e-mail, and sent it to Maury.

He logged off and looked at his watch. It was five thirty.

He had time to kill, so he went to where he'd killed so much of it before, shouldering his way past all the shoppers until he reached a familiar doorway. The sign on the door announced that tonight was the Bay State's annual Christmas party, with a full buffet starting at five thirty. He hadn't been back since he'd gotten sober, but now he missed his old friends.

A string of lights had been draped behind the bar. The jukebox had a few seasonal additions, led by Bing Crosby's “White Christmas,” with Burl Ives singing “Frosty the Snowman,” Elvis doing “Blue Christmas,” Gene Autry doing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the Chipmunks doing “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” and, perhaps most poignant of all, John Lennon's “Happy Xmas.” A group of women at the table by the window were dressed in shiny black cocktail dresses, but Paul's friends looked as they always did. O-Rings and Bender were at the bar. Brickman was at the bar too, seated where the counter met the wall, signaling that tonight he wanted to be left alone. Bender called Paul's name out loud.

“Where the hell have you been?” Bender asked. Silent Neil approached them. “Let me buy you a beer — what are you drinking?”

“Tonic and lime,” Paul said. Neil raised an eyebrow.

“That's it?” Bender asked. “Just tonic and lime?”

“That's it,” Paul said. “I'm trying to watch my girlish figure. How you feeling?”

“So how you doing, man? Long time no see. Where you been?” O-Rings interrupted.

“Around,” Paul said. “This and that.”

“Wow, man.” O-Rings looked at him for a few moments. “It's good to see you.” Paul remembered seeing O-Rings in bars around town and thinking, “Boy, that guy has a problem — every time I go to a bar, he's there.” It had eventually dawned on him that seeing O-Rings in a bar meant that he was in a bar too.

“You not drinking?” Bender asked.

“Not right now,” Paul said.

“My doctor said I can have one drink a day,” Bender said. He held up his glass. “This one is for Tuesday, June thirtieth, 2084.”

“How've you guys been?” Paul asked.

“We're okay,” Bender said.

“Doyle's not,” O-Rings slurred. “Unless you call living in your car okay.”

“Doyle's living in his car?”

“His girlfriend kicked him out a week ago,” Bender explained. “Let me buy you a drink.”

“I'm good,” he said, raising his glass.

“What's with the gin and tonic?” O-Rings asked. “You think it's summer or something?”

“It's just tonic,” Paul said. He wanted to ask O-Rings how his wife and kid were. He wanted to sing him a song: “Quit your ramblin', quit your gamblin', / Quit your stayin' out late at night / Stay home with your wife and your family / And sit by the fireside bright …”

He moseyed down the bar and took the stool next to Brickman.

“Hey, Bricks,” Paul said. “You in the mood for company?”

“Fucking lawyers,” Brickman said, slurring. “Goddamn fucking lawyers.”

“What now?”

“Sonia's lawyer said she wants three thousand dollars a month. Don't ever get divorced.”

“I already am divorced.”

“You are?” Brickman said. “Women are shit.”

Paul stared at Brickman.

“I'm gonna have to disagree with you there, pal,” Paul said.

“Then fuck you.”

“Jesus, Bricks — take it easy,” Paul said.

“Three thousand dollars a month and sole custody,” Bricks went on. “I am a good father. I am a
great
father …”

Paul moved to the jukebox, where D. J. and Mickey greeted him. He asked them how their boy was. Mickey said, “Don't ask.”

“We got him in a program in Stockbridge,” D. J. said. “Sort of a tough-love boot camp. I'll be amazed if he isn't worse off when he comes out. They won't let us visit. The guy who founded the school is a megalomaniac.”

“Why'd you send him there?” Paul asked.

“He developed a heroin addiction,” Mickey said, laughing. “Nice, huh? He's done some stupid shit, but we never expected he'd do that.”

Why was she laughing?

“Vaya con Dios,” Paul said.

He moved to the buffet and filled a small paper plate with buffalo wings. He looked at his watch. Only twenty minutes had passed. He used to spend entire evenings doing only this. Now time moved excruciatingly slowly. Before, every swallow was an event, marking time. He was enormously bored.

“You hear about McCoy?” O-Rings said, taking a piece of chicken from the chafing dish with his fingers.

“What about him?” Paul asked.

“He moved to Paris. Three weeks ago.”

“He did?”

O-Rings nodded.

“I'll be damned,” he said.

“Hey, Paul,” O-Rings said, “let me buy you a beer to drink a toast to McCoy — ”

“I'm not drinking — ”

“Hey, Neil — bring Paulie a beer!” D. J. called out.

Paul shook his head to tell Neil not to bother.

He took stock. He saw Bender, Brickman, O-Rings, Mickey, and Yvonne, all of them with glasses raised, all of them drunk at six thirty in the evening. He suddenly realized what should have been obvious. All his friends were alcoholics. All of them were flawed and human and pathetic in their way, all of them determined to keep the party of their lives going, all lost in their own small universe, their personal quest for the next best time, the next happy hour or happy minute or happy moment, and they were good people, and he loved them and wished them well, but they weren't part of his world anymore. More to the point, everything in Paul's new world was changing, and nothing in this world was.

He excused himself and went to the bathroom. He looked up when Silent Neil came in and occupied the urinal next to him. Paul smiled. Neil nodded.

“You on the wagon?” Neil said.

Paul was in shock.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Are you on the wagon?” Neil said.

“Yeah,” Paul said, stunned. Neil was actually talking to him. He had a deep, full voice, like James Earl Jones if Darth Vader were from Southie.

“For real? This is a permanent decision?”

“Yeah,” Paul said.

“Then don't come back here. They'll just suck you back in with them. I've seen it happen a hundred times.”

“They're my friends.”

“So see them for lunch. Have breakfast. Just don't come back here. If you want to stay sober, you have to make new friends. There's a meeting tomorrow night at seven at the Unitarian church if you want to go. I'd be glad to sponsor you.”

“AA?”

Neil nodded. Suddenly Paul realized Silent Neil was a spy, a mole, working deep behind enemy lines. “Just don't come back here. I mean it.”

Neil left.

Paul returned to the bar. From the jukebox, Bing Crosby was singing, “I'm dreaming of a white Christmas / Just like the ones I used to know …” When Paul looked out the window, he saw that it was snowing again. Yvonne with her bright red hair was consoling Brickman at the end of the bar. D. J. and Mickey were laughing about something. Bender was hitting on the girls in cocktail dresses. O-Rings was having a spectacular ball on the pinball machine. It felt like the last day at summer camp, and he was standing in the parking lot watching a busload of playmates driving off, except that he was moving and they weren't.

Paul waved to them as he headed for the door.

“I'll see you all later,” he said. “Merry Christmas, everybody.”

P
aul turned right on Main Street, stopping at a corner market to pick up dinner. The snow fell lightly, fine flakes that drifted easily in the windless sky. Everything was quiet and clean. In his head, he could still hear Bing Crosby singing, “May your days be merry and bright …” A Pioneer Valley Transit Authority bus pushed its way through the snow toward Amherst. Down the street, somebody was ringing a bell.

When he got home, he turned on his television. CNN reported on another billionaire's attempt to circle the planet in a balloon, and the beginning of Ramadan, and a Michigan meat-packing plant's recall of 35 million pounds of contaminated hot dogs (Paul could only recall one), and a freakish cold snap in California that was killing all the oranges. On a local news station, a chick reporter in a fuzzy Santa cap outside a shopping mall told him he had only three shopping days left. The Weather Channel said to expect more snow. It looked as if Bing Crosby's dreams were going to come true.

He was wrapping presents on the kitchen table when he heard a knock on his door. He wasn't expecting anyone. His first thought was that somebody was having car trouble. When he opened the door, his heart jumped in his chest.

It was Tamsen.

“Surprise,” she said. He couldn't think of a greater understatement. His heart raced. “Do you mind if I come in? I'm not disturbing you, am I?”

“I was just wrapping presents,” he said. He tipped his head to invite her in. If he was going to have a hallucination, this was exactly the one he would have. He took a deep breath to calm himself. She stomped the snow from her boots, then stepped out of them. “You want some cocoa or coffee or something?”

“Cocoa would be great,” she said.

She was wearing jeans and her black leather jacket with a black-and-white-checked kaffiyeh around her neck. She took off her coat and scarf, letting her hair fall free, longer than he remembered it. There was snow in her hair. She shook it out. How long had she been standing outside his house? She was wearing an Irish cable-knit sweater beneath the leather jacket, which she threw over a hook on the coatrack. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her, and kiss her, more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life, but he held off and kept his distance. It was becoming more and more likely that this was not a hallucination.

He heated two mugs of water in the microwave and added two packets of instant cocoa for Tamsen and himself. She took the mug from him, cupped her hands around it, and sipped. He wished he had minimarshmallows. He watched her lips, the shape they took when she blew on her cocoa. In the living room, she sat down on the couch. He'd draped a strand of miniature lights over a small Christmas tree he'd bought at Stop & Shop, a skeletal specimen, more like a large stem of grapes with the grapes all plucked than a respectable conifer, but it had looked as if it needed a good home, and it was cheap. It sat on the table at the end of the couch.

“You have a tree,” she remarked.

“Such as it is,” he said.

“It's nice,” she said, though he knew she was just being kind. “You need ornaments.”

He and Karen had started an ornament collection, though where they'd gone, he had no idea. It didn't matter. They were as unusable as his old wedding band.

He waited for Tamsen to say something else. There was no reason to assume her visit was good news. He strove to remain circumspect, though circumspection was hard to come by.

“Just passing through?” he asked.

“I had an errand,” she told him. “I have something for you.”

She reached into her bag. He thought she might be fishing for some sort of Christmas present and wished he'd gotten something for her, though her visit could hardly have been anticipated. Instead, she handed him a red bandanna, the one she'd given Stella the night she'd met them at the Bay State.

“Where'd you find it?” Paul asked, taking it from her.

“It was under my sofa,” Tamsen said. “It must have fallen off her neck when she was sleeping.”

He fingered the fabric, then lifted it to his nose and sniffed. The cotton fibers were infused with oils from the ceruminous glands in Stella's ears. He smiled as he recognized the scent, slightly yeasty and all hers.

“I know,” Tamsen said. “I was almost going to wash it, but then I thought maybe you'd rather have it unwashed.”

“You're right,” he said. “She'd appreciate the irony.”

“I keep finding hairs,” Tamsen said. “But I sort of hope I never find the last one.”

“You won't,” Paul said. “The other day I dropped a piece of cheese on the floor and I almost called her to come get it. It's hard to get used to the idea that she's not here.”

“I know,” Tamsen said. “I miss her. I think about her a lot. I can't walk through a doorway without expecting her to be lying outside waiting. Or I'll be sitting in a chair and I want to turn my
head because I feel like she's just beyond my peripheral vision. It's a presence. Or an absence.”