The Grief of Others (21 page)

When it had been decided (somehow, as if by an unseen signal) that it was time to go, Gordie had almost cried with selfrecrimination. He’d blown his chance to charm Hugh, a chance surely implicit in the offer of a ride. It would have been his first attempt trying to charm anyone, male or female, and the mechanics of the attempt had taken no concrete shape in Gordie’s mind beyond a vague notion of a look exchanged and then Hugh’s mouth closing in on—but never quite making contact with—his own. Did Gordie want to kiss? Or did he
want
to want to kiss?

On the way back to the road, sorting out his genuinely tipsy way between the trees, he’d grown aware of Hugh keeping pace just behind him, and in a last, desperate attempt to provide a romantic opening, Gordie had half willed, half allowed himself to stumble and fall flat on his front. When Hugh said, “Whoa! All right?” and paused above him, Gordie’d felt a rush of guilty triumph. When it turned out he had scraped and bloodied his wrist going down, he’d felt something like relief at acquiring this mark of authenticity, as though it absolved him of falsehood. But Hugh’s interest never rose above that moment, that mannerly pause while Gordie got back to his feet—he hadn’t even held a hand out to help Gordie up—and although they said hi after that whenever they passed in the halls, it was never more than perfunctory.

Being noticed by Jess, innocent of the fact that his and Ebie’s game of fetch was being performed for her benefit, was therefore similarly bittersweet, his sense of victory tainted by self-reproach, the knowledge that he had contrived this opening. Ebie, once she’d caught wind of Jess’s approach, had forestalled it with an onslaught of hospitality, bounding across the grass and bringing herself up short just before barreling into the girl, then wagging her hindquarters mightily while conducting, at her opposite end, olfactory operations of an almost surgical delicacy.

“Jess, right?” Gordie, wandering over, feigned uncertainty. “I didn’t notice you there.”

“You’re easy to spot, with your dog.” She wore an oversized sweatshirt—the very one, Gordie realized with a flush of embarrassed pleasure, that he’d worn the other day, while his own shirt dried—and a cotton skirt the color of tea.

“Oh. I guess, yeah.” He’d ruffled the fur at the back of Ebie’s neck. Was the motion ever so slightly different from the way he might normally have done it? Did his voice sound just a little altered, lower, perhaps, more clipped? Or was it only that he was watching himself, listening to himself, differently? “She’s easily spotted, anyway.” Did it come out resentful? Christ—did he sound jealous of his dog?

The odd thing was that his awkwardness, his hyperconsciousness, instead of tightening its stranglehold—as he was used to it doing whenever it latched on—had ebbed in Jess’s prolonged presence. No: the odd thing was that she continued to be present, just as if she were enjoying his company, as if she didn’t have anything else she’d rather be doing.

They’d walked downhill, past the fenced playground and the field with its wide gazebo where bands played in the summertime, down to the water’s edge. Jess had her clogs in her hand all this time, right up until they reached the rocky bank, at which point Gordie could no longer restrain himself. “I gotta tell you,” he said, “there’s broken glass, crack vials, dog crap, goose crap . . . rats, too, actually; you see them sometimes, even in daylight.You have to put on your shoes.” He was rather pleased with the way this came off: cool, commanding. The novelty of issuing an imperative made him feel strangely confident.

“Yes, Grandma.” But she did as he said.The first shoe went on all right, while she stood storklike on the other foot, but she went wobbly trying to slide her foot in the second and flailed, teetering, until he gripped her arm and steadied her.

“Thanks,” she’d said, once fully shod. “Pregnancy does a number on your sense of balance.”

He’d nodded.Then a full beat later:
“Oh.”
Embarrassed comprehension washing over him. Was the embarrassment on her behalf or on his own? He felt the same quaking heat in her presence as he had in Hugh’s, the same dizzying recognition of possibility. But was it, in both cases, a feeling predicated on the reassuring certainty that nothing would come of it?

“Almost eleven weeks,” she added.

Gordie nodded again, as if it were commonplace, as if
most
girls he knew were somewhere in their first trimester.

They’d exchanged quite a lot of vitals then, during that hour hanging out by the river, most of it spent perching side by side on the back of a bench. She was going to be a single mother, she said. As one might announce the intention of becoming a doctor or an artist. Gordie didn’t know what to make of it.

“My dad was a single parent.”

“Yeah? What happened with your mom?”

“Died. Some kind of infection. When I was a baby.”

“Grim,” said Jess.

From their bench, as they chatted, they marked the rheumatic progress of a garbage barge as it made its way under the bridge, carrying its load toward Manhattan and the open sea. At last Jess announced, “My butt’s sore,” and stood up. “You have a car, don’t you?”

“A car?” Gordie scrambled after her onto the rocks, where she was picking her way precariously in those clogs. “Yeah.”

“We should go somewhere.You want?”

“Sure, maybe. Where?”

“New York.”

“The city? What do you want to do there?”

“I don’t know.Walk around. Get lost.”

She wasn’t looking at him but out at the water. A sailboat tacked to and fro. The river was at its widest here, nearly three miles across, and there was something quaint about the opposite shore at that distance; it was like a scale model in a train store, or a landscape in a tintype, glimpsed back at through time.

“What would I do with Ebie?”

They both looked around for the dog. Some twenty yards away, she was rolling around ecstatically at the water’s edge. “Ah, shit,” said Gordie. He jumped off the rocks and jogged toward her.

It was a dead seagull, its fetid body spread out on a patch of asphalt and weeds. Gordie had to use his sharpest tone to persuade Ebie to abandon her rapture. When at last she did, she bounded around, tongue lolling, as though to say, “Aren’t I a pip?” She reeked.

“Stop,” Gordie barked at Jess, who was progressing swiftly toward them. “You don’t want to get any closer.”

He experienced a flicker of satisfaction when she did, immediately, halt. Unaccustomed as he was to wielding authority, he felt he was doing it rather well, casually and in good cause. Evidently, though, he had not stopped her soon enough.

“
Dude
. She smells like a horror show.”

Ebie wagged her tail, guilty and low.

Gordie looked at her. “That’s right, you dope,” he said softly. Then, “So much for going to the city,” he called back over his shoulder. “At least, today.” He didn’t know if he was more disappointed or relieved.

“What will you do now?”

He shrugged. “Bathe her.”

Jess walked along with them back up the hill, through the park, toward his dad’s car. “Want help?” she asked, once Ebie had climbed in on top of the blanket in the back.

“With what?”

“Giving her a bath.”

“Are you serious?”

Jess flipped up her palms, shrugged.

Gordie thought about what it would entail. No one had been over since his dad got sick. Not that Gordie had lived in utter and complete solitude these months. He’d met up with a few of his dad’s friends in diners, dropped in at a couple of house parties held by former classmates. People had reached out, a handful of acquaintances left over from senior year: the dregs of the class, like him, people who hadn’t gone away to school, hadn’t moved on. But he’d had no one over.

He looked at Jess, in John’s great droopy sweatshirt and her petal-light skirt, her dark eyes (very like Hugh Chaudhuri’s, he noticed) squinting and watering a little in the sharp path of the sun. She had suggested going somewhere with him twice in the space of fifteen minutes. Was it that she wanted to be with him, or was it that she wanted to go?

“You sure?” he asked. “I mean.The car . . . the smell . . .”

But she was game.They drove through town with the windows rolled down and the fan blasting a potpourri of fresh air and stale cigarette odor at their faces. Something new had happened.

At the condo complex Gordie pulled into their numbered parking space. He wondered if Jess was surprised, if she’d been expecting a house, a single-family in town instead of a brick complex by the thruway. Inside, the stairwell was dim; a bulb was out. “Two flights,” Gordie said. Beneath poor Ebie’s stench Gordie could smell the regular odor of the hallway, not unclean exactly, but heavy and close. His awareness of it was sharpened by Jess’s presence. A soap opera was audible behind a neighbor’s door. It hit Gordie, as he unlocked the door to their own unit, that the kitchen was full of trash he hadn’t taken out, dishes he hadn’t washed. He was glad, at least, that the radio he’d left on for so many months, loath to end something his dad had set in motion, was no longer playing: he did not think he would have been able to bear being exposed at that level.

They stepped inside, Ebie pushing past them to inspect her bowl. Never had the condo looked so shabby to Gordie, at once eccentrically cluttered and just plain grungy.The sun was coming in at just the angle to best illuminate the crumbs on the Formica countertops; the vinyl flooring was sticky underfoot.A fly, trapped between two panes of glass, buzzed in the window above the sink. Just as the previous week he’d wondered if John Ryrie’s other daughter might be afraid of him, afraid of getting into a car with a strange man, now he wondered if Jess was having misgivings about getting herself into this situation, finding herself here in a seedy-looking apartment with a man she did not after all quite know. A sense of unfairness, bitterness, and defeat clamped down on him, as though she’d already changed her mind.

“I’m going to stick Ebie on the balcony while I fill the bath,” he muttered.

“Okay.”

He could feel her watching uncomfortably as he wrestled the foul creature outside and slid shut the heavy door. Ebie looked up at him and wagged slowly, smudging the glass with her nose. Jess said, “Is anything wrong?”

“I’ll start the water,” he said, going into the bathroom.

He turned on the taps, found the bottle of dog shampoo. He smelled his plaid jacket, shed it. In the mirror he saw a furrow between his eyebrows. He relaxed his muscles; it went away. He splashed water on his face. The little room began to fog. He felt the water in the tub, switched off the taps.

When he came back to the kitchen, it was empty. He glanced out to the balcony; Ebie met his gaze and gave a short whine. “I’ll be back,” he told her through the glass. He was relieved when he found Jess in the living room, not gone after all, not hitching a ride on Route 59, but standing with her hands clasped behind her, perusing the shelves. His father’s dioramas crowded there, long unattended, furnished with dust and the occasional cobweb, in places two deep, in places stacked one upon another.

“You made these?” Jess did not turn.

“No.”

He felt her reverence, her absorption, like a rise in barometric pressure. As he watched she stooped, then knelt, in order to peer into the ones on a bottom shelf.

“Is there more light?” It was a request.

He switched it on.

She whispered something he did not catch, did not think he was meant to. She said, “Your father?”

“Yeah. My dad.”

Looking at her looking at the boxes, he apprehended something about them.They were the root he’d stumbled on, the root his dad had left purposely sticking up.

“Are they based on stuff?” she asked. “This one looks like, from the
Odyssey,
you know, that island with the pigs. And there was another like Hansel and Gretel, a trail of bread crumbs in the woods?”

“They are from books, some of them, if that’s what you mean. A lot he just did from his imagination.”

“He was an artist.”

“Postal worker.”

“Serious?” She turned.

He nodded.

She turned back to the boxes. “Oh. Jordie, how long ago did he die?”

“In January. It’s Gordie, actually.”

“Oh, God!” She swiveled to him again, covering her mouth. “Sorry!”

“It’s all right. He’d been sick awhile.”

“No, I mean—yes, I’m sorry about—but I mean, I’ve been calling you the wrong thing
all this time
?”

“That’s okay.” He coughed. “I should check the bath.”

After Ebie had been bathed and toweled, they went out on the tiny balcony and ate peanut butter crackers and sour pickles, the best Gordie could muster from the derelict cupboards and fridge.“Is this a joke?” Jess asked when he first brought forth the food, and he thought she was riding him about such poor offerings. But she laid a hand on her stomach, on what he now recognized as a meaningful protrusion, and he recalled the cliché: the pregnant woman’s craving for pickles and ice cream, and he wished he’d intended the wit.

Ebie lay at their feet, her drying fur redolent of doggie shampoo and sunshine and also, faintly, something gamier: salty and dark. Jess sat in Will’s old chair and used Ebie’s hindquarters as a footrest. She ate like a farmhand, ravenously, steadily, one peanut butter cracker after another, and then polished off the pickles, and Gordie began to fear he’d run out of food before she ran out of room. But at last she’d settled back in her chair, hands folded over her small bulge, and tipped her face to the sky.

Gordie took advantage of her eyes being closed to study her. He couldn’t decide whether she was pretty or not. He was trying to think what his dad would say if he came home to find Gordie out here with a girl. He’d be glad, relieved of the great worry he’d been too tactful ever to voice. “Well done,” he’d say. “Yer a sly one, then, eh?”