The Dwelling: A Novel (41 page)

Richie nodded and shrugged, allowing that it was. If he thought about it, and he had been trying very hard not to lately, writing and publishing was no place for a loved one.
Will build bridge for food,
would not cut it as a
New Yorker
cartoon.

He pulled the ladder back down so that it was propped against the floor of the upstairs hall. Above them yawned the black hole of the attic. “Let’s go up, see the place. It’s dark, it’s dingy, you have to fumble around to the desk to turn on the light—I’m using a desk lamp—and I had to run power from the wall all the way from the front of the house, so there’s cords”—From downstairs, he heard the phone ring. RJ was just stepping onto the ladder.

“I’m going to grab that, you go on up.” And he ran down the stairs to get the phone, catching it on the fourth ring.

“Hey,” he breathed into the phone. Too much smoking.

“It’s me, Richie.”
Jennifer. Not-his-Jen anymore.

Jennifer. Party. Last night.
Asshole.
His head ached again and he realized he needed more aspirin. He carried the portable phone into the kitchen with him and started opening cupboards. “Hey,” he repeated. “What’s up?”

He heard her clear her throat and for a moment her neck and its length came into his mind’s eye with an ache much worse than the one in his head. He closed the cupboard he’d opened and checked another. He looked in cupboards while she talked.

“I just got thinking about you. Sorry I was rude last night,” she said, drawing it out as though not sorry at all, but wanting amends to be made. “What you do is none of my business.”

“You weren’t. I was”—
an asshole
—“rude. Anyway, I’m sorry. Wasn’t a nice way to say hello again. How are you doing? Or did you already tell me?” He laughed nervously. From upstairs he heard footsteps creaking: RJ was wandering around up there.

She didn’t laugh. There was a pause and then she said, “I thought you quit.”

Drinking was their issue, if they had to put a finger on it. There were many, many,
many
other issues, but they all somehow came to be about him drinking. It annoyed the hell out of him. It wasn’t like he was a drunk. He drank too much on occasion. That was it. The end. All there was to it, and if he was alone in being the only one who drank too much
on occasion,
then he would absolutely, without a doubt, quit.

“Is that why you called?” he asked, his face scrunching up in an annoyed frown. “To be my mother? I can’t talk, RJ’s here.” But he did not say good-bye or hang up. He listened.

“How’s the kiddo doing?” she asked, with affection.

“He’s going to be an engineer,” Richie said wryly.

“Good plans. Unions, partnerships, development grants—”

He cut her off. “I’ll be sure to have him talk to you. So, what’s going on? The boyfriend out of town, or something?” He was not forgiving her easily. Another issue.

“You just looked shitty last night. I got thinking about it, thought I’d call.”

He found the bottle of aspirin behind a rack of coffee mugs in the last cupboard. He pulled it out and yanked the cap off fiercely, hurting his finger. He mouthed the word
fuck
and shook four pills out of the bottle. They would make his ears ring later, but they would take care of the headache. He grabbed one of the coffee mugs and filled it with water from the tap. He downed it, and with a mouthful of water, answered her, so that it came out slightly garbled. “I looked shitty. Nice. You gained five pounds.”

“I
know
when I’ve gained five pounds. I look
fab-u-lous,
thank you very much.” She laughed. “I don’t mean shitty that way. I mean, you looked…off. Like you’ve been thinking too much about all the wrong things. I just thought I’d call and see if you wanted to get together and…” She trailed off and they were paused together on the phone.

Richie’s mind clicked away at possibilities,
hey anything to get you in bed,
or
it’s true I need to be made
love
to heh heh
—and the smooth sway of her back as it yielded to the curve of her backside and the time when they went to the beach in the middle of March and dumped their clothes and went for a very fast swim. Some guy drove up when they were coming out of the water, completely naked and freezing, and he was just getting out of his truck. He took one look and jumped back in and fired out of the lot. He smiled, remembering that.

As if she’d felt him smile or heard it, she said,
“What?”

“I was thinking about that time at Black Lake.”

She snorted into the phone and he knew exactly how her breath would smell. “So I was thinking dinner on Tuesday,” she offered. “Okay?”

He nodded. “Okay. You wanna go out or should I impress you?”

“Impress me,” she said softly. From upstairs, he heard the knock of feet on the floor and the sound of the ladder swinging up on its pulleys. It went up and then down again. Then again.

“I’ll say hi to Engineer Bob for you,” he said. Feet on the stairs.

“Give him my love. See you Tuesday around seven,” she said, and they hung up.

Richie kept himself to two beers through the game at Dubs’s. With him and RJ there were six of them: Dubs, Steve, Brad, and Rob. No wives or girlfriends, but Brenda had made trays of goodies before she went off wherever she’d gone. There were sandwiches and cheese and salami and bags of chips with dip made from onion-soup mix and sour cream, and beer.

“You know, when Brenda made sandwiches for Mikey’s christening, she cut the crusts off,” Steve said pointedly. “How come she left them on for us?”

“You’re not worth the extra effort, Stevie,” Brad said, stuffing half a sandwich into his mouth. “Try that, RJ,” he said to Rick Jr.

“If your mouth’s as big as your dad’s it should be
nooo
problem.” Rob snorted.

It was like that all afternoon, with smart remarks and insults of the sort Richie knew that at least Janis tried to teach RJ not to use. He watched RJ watching the action and soaking it all in. He smiled at most of it, but there was sometimes a look of confusion on his face. The guys managed to keep their language decent for the most part, except during crucial moments of yardage, penalties and touchdowns. RJ laughed when someone swore. He seemed to find
fuckme
most amusing. Steve already had a kid, but Brenda and Dubs were so far childless (which Steve never failed to point out, assuming in a falsely sympathetic tone that there was something wrong with Dubs’s dick:
Get that thing to work, yet?)
so his language was more colorful than most.

It went uncommented on until Steve lost out on his point spread and sang loudly, a series of about ten
fuckme fuckme fuckme
s and then everyone jumped on him at once.

“Sorry,” he said, laughing. “RJ, don’t listen to me. I have a mouth like a truck driver. When your mom was dating your dad she used to charge me a dollar for every F-word,” he laughed. “I think I still owe her about a hundred bucks.”

RJ looked stunned. “My mom dated my dad?” That stopped all conversation in the room for a beat and then everyone laughed.

Richie picked up the ball, putting a hand on his heart and saying, with mock sincerity, “Believe it or not, your mom and I were once an item. Many years ago. You are what we have to show for our deep love.” He laughed, too.

“That’s so gross,” RJ said, recoiling comically. Everyone laughed.

It was a good day.

RJ was still hungry on the way home, in spite of everything they’d eaten at Dubs’s place, so they stopped and picked up a pizza and ate it in the kitchen, the least offensive room in the house. Richie moved beer bottles off the table and the two of them ate right out of the box.

“So if you and Mom dated, and you had me, how come you never got married?”

“Mom never talked to you about that?” RJ shook his head. Richie shrugged easily. “We were young—well, not that young, I guess. But we weren’t the best couple. I think we knew that if we got married, it would have been the long way around the inevitable. I mean divorce, you know. So we cut our losses and decided to have you and raise you together, and now we’re best friends—I count on your mom for a lot, you know—and so everything worked out great.”

RJ considered this and nodded. “A lot of my friends’ parents are divorced,” he said.

“There you go.”

“Are you going to marry Jennifer?” he asked. There was a pained pause that RJ didn’t notice, but it filled the air in Richie’s lungs and made him realize how much he couldn’t share with the kid. He wasn’t sure, at that moment, if he had even mentioned their break-up, and guessed he must have, but that RJ didn’t understand about those things. He skipped over it awkwardly.

“Don’t you have homework? It’s after nine. Your mom would kill me if she knew that I was feeding you pizza at nine o’clock at night, school the next morning, after hanging around with filthy guys who swear and gamble and then asking you to do your homework. She would have my
balls—”
he said dramatically. RJ laughed so hard at that, red-faced and half embarrassed, that he spat pizza out in self-defense.

Richie grinned, self-satisfied.
Nothing like a dick joke to change the subject.

He set his son up in the room under the stairs, getting sheets on the bed and letting him do his homework in there, giving him until ten. “Then lights out, no joking, RJ. I’ll be checking.”

“’Kay,” he said, and Richie closed the door on the image of his son, who managed somehow to look like a baby in his big-boy pajamas, his hair falling softly over his forehead, and at the same time, a man-to-be.

The vision in his living room was less wholesome.

Everywhere he looked there were beer bottles. He could smell flat, sweet beer and the stale air of cigarette smoke. Every surface had a layer of filth on it. Someone had obviously spilled something and then stepped in it; with the light shining on the floor from the overhead lamp, he could see the dried puddle and the dust bunnies it had gathered during the day, and the outline of a shoeprint just outside the puddle. There was a smear of ash on his green sofa, which was no great shakes to begin with, and he bent over it, brushing the ash away, hoping it wasn’t burned. It wasn’t. The ashtray was at his feet and he kicked it, spilling butts and ash all over the floor.

He closed his eyes against it and wanted nothing more than to hit the sack and leave it all for the fairies.

Instead he bent down and started picking up butts, putting them into the ashtray.

Penance.
He carried it into the kitchen, collecting a couple of empties on the way. He dumped the contents of the ashtray into the garbage can and stuck the empties into a case. He grabbed another case to take into the living room and inside it was an orphaned bottle, still full. Its brothers and sisters were either empty or in the fridge. He pulled it out and opened the fridge to put it in.

Inside, the bright, bald light sparkled off a dozen or so full, cold beers.

Would make it go faster.
Behind the beer was a big bottle of ketchup, and a carton of orange juice. Take-out containers were on the shelf underneath and in all it was a pathetic sight, although he reminded himself that he’d just moved in and—
cut a guy some slack!
—he hadn’t gone shopping yet. The little light in the fridge glowed amber through the glass.
The color of love. See the world through amber glasses. Beer goggles.

His hand shook as he set the beer bottle on the shelf. It knocked into another and glass on glass tinkled invitingly. Richie swallowed.
I don’t even want one.

He took a beer out and twisted off the cap. It sounded like wet evil and music; Satan and the love of a good woman. Smelled like vomit and a headache.

For Chrissakes, it’s just one. Cut a guy some slack. Drinking no more; also no less.

Sweet escape and, aaah, it’s a party.

He raised it to his mouth and took a swallow.

It did make it go faster, as though that were the price for the beer itself. He dragged himself through the first one, drinking it slow, making it last. He was only halfway through it when he heard the light switched off in RJ’s room. By the time the living room looked habitable again, he was on his second. That one didn’t last half as long. He put Nilsson on the stereo and dug on that, feeling the beginnings of a nice buzz. Before starting on the dining room, he sat on the couch and lit a smoke, dragging deeply, thinking only once about the smell wafting into the bedroom where his son was sleeping. There was a mild twinge of guilt, deeply ingrained and complicated and thick, that had little to do with smoking and everything to do with the kind of father he was on the whole, that in some kind of inner defense disappeared without much notice, as though it were an animal so large as to be impossible to contain. The only real defense against that creature was to close your eyes against it and pretend it wasn’t there; that and another beer.

It was during the third beer that he started thinking about hitting the computer. Before he was too drunk to write anything. The very thought of writing invited back the animal (
must be kept at bay
) and made him tired. Richie tried to remember the last time he’d worked on the book and came up with Friday night. What had he written? Maybe half a page. He’d sat for hours at the computer, drinking water and trying to make sense of a useless second act. He’d been working on the second half of his fourth book for nearly six months and was no further ahead than he had been at the beginning. He never, ever, not even in jest or to himself in the small hours of the naked morning, used the word
blocked.
He was not blocked. Sometimes he allowed himself to believe it was simply an unwritable book and then his futile attempts to produce something were draped in nobility. His plot was too complicated. There were too many elements to be dealt with easily. There were some moments of brilliance and some amazing scenes of utter grace and beauty that he had no idea where inside him they might have come from. Those moments kept it alive. And maybe that was it: maybe he was keeping something alive that was better off dead. Thinking it gave him a surge of some kind of protective instinct not dissimilar from the way he sometimes felt about RJ. He felt that, however briefly then.
I can write this bitch. Whatever works.