B008J4PNHE EBOK (23 page)

“No, I’m not teasing,” she promised. It was Polly, though, and she was trying to conceal a smile behind her mug of hot chocolate, so that hardly constituted a definitive answer. With her large green eyes and crinkled chin, amusement was programmed into Polly’s countenance. Even after so many years, he found it hard to resist, the implication in her face that she knew a funny—and very possibly filthy—secret. But it could be tedious, too.

She swiveled to the child and put on her baby-talk voice. “I would never tease that man! Would I yank Uncle Sam’s dick, Mr. Rainer?”

Rainer goggled at her, then at Sam, before producing an infuriated squawk.

“Don’t say that in front of him.” Polly’s choice of words was a purposeful tweak. Rainer’s mother had undertaken the task of yanking Uncle Sam’s dick on more than one occasion, skillfully, and with Uncle Sam’s encouragement.

She leaned forward, and Sam didn’t fail to notice the parentheses of
her pale cleavage, which had always been enticing and, with the galvanizing arrival of young Rainer, only more so. “Answer my question, then.”

What sort of intrusions might make a wedding worthy of real celluloid, as opposed to the digital that he ran off in endless megabytes? Sam pictured an eruption of red ants spilling from the beak of an ice-sculpture goose. Every wedding had at least one senile granny; there could be a moment of opera, Grandma tearing out her nose tubes, clawing upright from her wheelchair, and letting loose with a keening minor note that exploded a hundred glasses. What would they do, all the guests in their formal wear, if a massive claw plunged from the sky and scooped the entire five-tiered vanilla cake with the trowel of a single talon? Sam knew what he would do: keep rolling.

“Catastrophe.”

“Catastrophe? Like an earthquake?”

“No, like a real catastrophe. Like Pompeii.”

“You want everyone to die horribly? At a beautiful wedding, Sammy? Those poor people all choked on ash and got turned into fossils.” Polly stuck a finger and thumb into her hot chocolate, picked up the planetary hunk of marshmallow floating there, raised it to her mouth, and gasped. “You would die, too, Sam!” She let the marshmallow plop back into the chocolate. “You do know that I don’t want you to die? You do know that no one wants you to die?”

“Yes, I fucking know that. Look, obviously, I would only shoot a Pompeii wedding if I had some sort of lava-proof position.”

“Rainer certainly doesn’t want you to die, does he?” She tickled one of the baby’s pudgy brown cheeks and shook her head at him and smiled and crossed her eyes. Rainer drooled. “He
loves
you,” said Polly, still goggling at the baby. “Yes, he
does
.”

Sam sipped his hot chocolate. It was delicious, August be damned. At the surrounding tables, other young women were enjoying hot chocolate with their adorable moppets, their girl friends, or their gay pals. Everyone appeared amused, flummoxed by the impossible marshmallows. On the exterior of one of the City Bakery’s large street-side windows, a diminutive vagrant dressed in an oily overcoat, blond beard tangled and matted, talked and gestured sharply with his hands, though there was no one near him. As Sam observed the unfortunate’s
conversation with the air, he concluded that the affair with Polly was another sort of pantomime. It wasn’t helping her or him; it was just what they were accustomed to doing. The vagrant’s overcoat billowed in a gust of wind, and he spun, flailing at the garment, as if he didn’t realize he was wearing it and thought it was chasing him. Sam sipped again. Maybe the chocolate was a tad acrid.

“You do realize that some person is going to want to marry you someday?”

“Maybe we’ll elope.”

“I can promise you that no woman, unless she’s an orphan or a prostitute, honestly wants to elope. And if the woman’s an orphan, it’s only because she doesn’t know any better.”

Sam said he hadn’t known that.

Polly said he could ask anyone. “Boy, you are going to make your wife tear her hair out. Your attitude is going to make her want to hang herself with her own garter. Thank God for Jo-Jo.”

Jo-Jo was Polly’s husband. An ex-ballplayer fifteen years her senior, Johannes “Jo-Jo” Knecht, born overseas to a German mother and an American serviceman, had been a light-hitting backup catcher for the late-nineties Yankees championship teams. The tabloids had nicknamed him “the Good German,” and New York fans had esteemed him for his ability to block home plate against stampeding baserunners.

In the third game of the 1998 World Series, Jo-Jo had earned a measure of national fame when he checked the homeward sprint of a San Diego Padres shortstop named Esteban Herrera. The highlight of the collision shows Herrera breaking for the plate on a squeeze play, bracing for the impact by locking his forearms over his chest, until at the final moment he appears not to connect with the Yankees catcher so much as ricochet off a forcefield, flying backward several feet, all the way to the batting circle, where he lands on a twelve-year-old batboy. Herrera was lost for the Series with a concussion, the batboy ended up in traction, and the Padres were swept in four.

In retirement, Jo-Jo had taken a position providing studio commentary for Yankee broadcasts. His speech retained a faint Anglo-German accent that lent his insights a canny ring that people apparently liked; Sam thought he sounded like the Artful Dodger blended with a smidgen of Terminator. In the receiving line at his wedding to Polly, he had
hauled Sam into a crushing embrace and tearfully proclaimed, “Nothing but love today, dude, yah?” The retired catcher also held an interest in a chain of used-car lots for which he was featured in an annoying series of television commercials.

None of that impressed Sam, however, who wasn’t a sports fan. (Though he knew enough to consider the Yankees objectionable on principle. Talk of the so-called Yankee Way had, to Sam’s ear, a fundamentalist ring—like maybe it wasn’t the Yankee Way to perform oral sex, or to wear the color yellow during the month of January, or something like that.)

What did garner his respect were Jo-Jo’s thighs. They were immense; they had the hard cylindrical shape of watermelons, the freakish kind that won prizes at fairs. It was these living pylons that had given him the power to repel other steroidal men from home plate. Jo-Jo’s thighs looked constructed, coopered, like casks.

Although the man had never treated Sam with anything less than cheerful goodwill, Sam feared—quite reasonably, considering the sordid acts he had engaged in, and continued to engage in, with Jo-Jo’s wife—that Jo-Jo would find out what was going on and kill him, boa constrictor–style, with his terrible thighs. There could be no ghastlier fate than to be scissored to death between those ham hocks.

Polly had met Jo-Jo when he came to visit the first-grade class that she had been teaching at a charter school in Fort Greene. She told Sam that it was seeing Jo-Jo squished down at the tiny art table, and hearing him interact with a five-year-old named Cricket, that had won her heart. “We’re gonna need some of that blue paper there and a white crayon, yah?” Jo-Jo had informed Cricket, and spent a half hour painstakingly instructing the child in the art of drawing the interlocking
N
and
Y
of the Yankees’ symbol. It didn’t seem to matter that Jo-Jo displayed zero interest in the things that Polly liked aside from sports—novels, music, fashion, or gossip. Nor did it seem to make any difference that she continued to like sleeping with Sam.

She claimed they were in love, she and Jo-Jo, and maybe they were. Love could be fraught and bizarre, and there were always secrets, arrangements of which no one else was aware. All you had to do was think about anyone’s parents. The affair Polly was conducting didn’t, Sam had to concede, rule out some kind of successful, loving marriage.
Who knew how it was behind closed doors, what actually went on between Polly and her husband and her husband’s thighs.

“Why are you so concerned with a wife I don’t have?” asked Sam.

“Because you’re intent on spoiling her wedding by being a jaded poop about everything.” Polly moaned. He heard her stomp her feet under the table. “You are so frustrating. I don’t understand how you can hate weddings.”

“Because they’re my job,” he said. “And I never said that. I said they were dull and tiresome, and if something awful happened, it would be more interesting to film.”

“But you need to have one, Sam. Don’t you see? Your wedding is like the birthday party for the rest of your life.” Polly’s voice had grown small. She sounded the way people sound when they have at last accepted that a beloved and irreplaceable possession—a photo, an earring, the cat—is not going to turn up after all.

What Polly failed to comprehend was that weddings were just one of the many, many things that bored and irritated him these days. He had suffered a great loss, and he could be sour, but with the exception of thoughts about Booth, Sam rarely engaged in conscious negativity. He didn’t have the energy.

Sam tried to switch subjects; he asked if Jo-Jo really liked him. Polly said yes, but who cared, Sam was
her
friend. There followed a silence then, which Polly didn’t usually permit. It meant she was actually mad.

Rainer released a sudden burble of outrage and kicked his baby shoes. “I understand exactly how you feel, sweetheart,” Polly said. “Uncle Sam can be an unbelievable pisser.”

The bearded vagrant was gazing in their direction. He gave an exaggerated blink, squeezing his eyes shut tight, then opening them wide. It was the action of a child calling on all his reserves of courage before throwing open a closet door. The man raised a pale, shaking hand. His curly hair and long beard streamed left in another burst of wind.

It was a greeting to some ghost, Sam inferred, and in its tentativeness there was also a feeble plea. For what, Sam couldn’t guess. He had to count himself lucky there.

“What are we doing?” Sam asked abruptly. What he meant was: let’s stop meeting in secret, having sex, messing with your marriage, messing with your kid’s life; it’s not fun anymore.

“Don’t start.” Polly rose and began snatching up her things and stuffing them in her bag. It was time to go to see her shrink, she announced; her tits ached, summer had crapped out on them without so much as a fare-thee-well and, she finished, thanks to him, for days to come she would be ruminating on Pompeii, thinking about people being boiled alive in lava and turned into statues, because that was just how her mind worked.

He stood and put out his arms. Polly hugged him hard, as if she wanted to crack something, then let go, hoisted Rainer’s seat, and departed without a backward glance. Sam sat and watched her go.

Polly turned right, lugging Rainer’s seat, her free hand lifted to hail a taxi, and passed beyond Sam’s sight.

The vagrant staggered off in the other direction, waving his arms around as if trying to ward off a cloud of midges. Then the vagrant was gone, too. Sam wondered what it was like to live like that, pestered by phantoms, at mortal odds with your own head.

Sam took a sip of cooling, clotting chocolate and somehow managed to swallow it.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Only here, now, on this random Thursday night in September, at the nuptials of two middle-aged academics, as the weddingographer filmed from his spot between the balcony newels, an elderly man in academic robes shuffled up the aisle to take a place between the spouses-to-be. This elderly man was the officiant. The program bestowed upon him the title Poet. That was different.

For the occasion, the poet had donned academic robes, silvery at the seams from decades of use. He stooped, craning his neck to gaze at the audience from the pit between his shoulders. The tight white curls of his hair appeared yellowed at the tips, a detail that suggested a life gone marvelously beyond ripe. His voice was piping.

The poet began by telling the assembled, the family and friends of these two middle-aged professors, “So, here we are on the last night of summer. The last night of summer. I thought it would never end. Never end. Well, I guess we’ll just have to see what this new season has to offer. This new season.” Before continuing, the poet glanced meaningfully at the husband-to-be, then at the wife-to-be. “The woman I loved has been
dead for six years now. I think of her each day. Each day. She was a beauty and a wit and a friend. To have known her was, and remains, my greatest blessing. She is here still. Still . . .

“She is. Literally. Literally. I still find her detritus around the apartment. Lena was a woman of innumerable qualities, but few if any of them were better developed than her general scabrousness. Only the other day I discovered that she had left me a used Band-Aid on page 121 of our
Collected Larkin
.” The elderly gentleman rolled his eyes and wagged his head. “Thank you very much, Lena.”

The crowd laughed.

Sam narrowed the aperture of the lens, carving off the bride and groom, and it was as though the man were speaking to him alone, the eye in the balcony.

“But look at this here—” The poet lifted a finger. There was a Band-Aid on the ring finger. “Look at this here . . . Love is not easy. You carry it around with you forever.” He placed his hands on the shoulders of the bride and groom. “It is the most glorious encumbrance a human being can shoulder. But it is not light. No, it is not light . . .”

The poet winked at the groom. He turned to the bride and leaned in to whisper something private in her ear. She giggled.

With that, the elderly gentleman once again addressed the audience, to ask forebearance for a few lines of verse. Not his own, he said, he was letting them off for good behavior. It was a poem by Jack Gilbert called “A Brief for the Defense”:

“Sorrow everywhere,” it began. There followed a series of juxtapositions between hunger and beauty, sickness and laughter. This gave the basis for an argument about joy, about the necessity for it, the duty of each person to accept it. To refuse joy was an immoral act and an insult to humanity. The elderly gentleman recited with his eyes closed. At the end of each line, his withered voice rose, as plangent as wind through a crack in the wall: