How to Talk to a Widower (16 page)

23

WHEN I GET HOME, STEPHEN IVES IS ON THE PORCH,
trying like hell to break down my front door. He backs up all the way to the porch steps and then charges forward, hitting the door with his shoulder. Judging from his labored breathing and the dark pit stains on his Egyptian cotton dress shirt, he's been at if for a while already. “Claire!” he yells. “You're going to talk to me!”

“Go home, Stephen,” Claire calls from an upstairs window. “You're going to hurt yourself.”

I look up to see Claire and Russ perched comfortably on the window ledge outside Russ's old room.

“Hey, Doug,” Russ says, grinning at me. He's drinking a Coke and clearly enjoying the show.

Claire waves tiredly, raising her eyebrows apologetically at me. “He won't leave.”

I turn back to Stephen, who is now trying to kick down the door like a cop, but cops don't wear flimsy three-hundred-dollar dress shoes, which leave nasty crescent-shaped skid marks on my door, but don't really give much in the way of tactical support.

“Hey, Stephen,” I say. “What's new and exciting?”

“Stay out of this, Doug. I'm warning you,” he snarls, flashing me a menacing frown before throwing another running kick at the door. The usually immaculate Stephen, who dresses like a Hugo Boss ad and generally perspires only in the quilted tennis bubbles and steam rooms of his country club, is a sight to behold. His sweaty hair, thick with gel, hangs in descending spikes over his forehead, making him look like Elvis, not fat Vegas Elvis but skinny movie Elvis after he beats up the bullies in the diner who forced him to sing along to the jukebox.

“You're going to hurt yourself,” I say.

“I'm going to hurt you if you take one step onto this porch.”

“It's my house, Stephen.”

He turns to face me, his handsome jaw trembling with rage, eyes wide and crazed. “Do I look like I give a shit?”

He does not, and I know he doesn't need a particularly compelling excuse to kick my ass. Stephen has hated me for pretty much as long as he's known me, and not just because I trashed him in his wedding toast. At Claire's prodding, he gave me a job at his company, which I could have told him would end badly. I screwed it up in a matter of months, by sleeping with one of the administrative assistants. As it turned out, he'd been planning to fire her, but now that I'd slept with her, he was scared of the legal ramifications, although he had no such concerns when it came to firing me. I used to fuck stuff up like that all the time. I didn't see the big deal. I do now, but you don't go and apologize to someone five years after the events in question. And even if I did, the fact would still be etched into my permanent record as far as he's concerned. He reached out to me and I crapped on his hand. A short while after that I got drunk at Thanksgiving dinner and punched him in the nose. They broke it up before he could hit me back, and nothing festers in a man more than an unanswered sucker punch. So I owe him an apology and he owes me a punch in the face and it's just not a good recipe for a friendly conversation. So I stay where I am at the foot of the porch stairs and say, “Knock yourself out,” and Stephen goes back to hurling himself at my door and calling out to Claire.

“Get the fuck out of here, Stephen. I mean it!” Claire shouts.

“I just want to talk to you!” he shouts.

“Then you should have called me!”

“You won't take my calls!”

“Then you wait until I'm ready to take them. I don't work for you, Stephen. You can't schedule me like a meeting.”

“Just get down here and open this fucking door!”

He hits the door again and this time I can hear the wood groan, the faintest sound of preliminary splintering, but then his legs crumple under him and he drops to his knees, letting out an agonized sob as he clutches his shoulder. “Is he okay?” Claire calls down to me.

“He's looked better,” I say. “Why don't you come down and talk to him?”

“Butt out, Doug.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Stephen struggles to his feet, still clutching his battered shoulder, and staggers out from under the porch roof and down the steps, lurching past me to look up at Claire from the lawn, his eyeballs throbbing with desperation. “Please, Claire,” he says, his voice ragged and hoarse. “Don't do this.”

“I have to,” she says softly.

“I love you.”

“No. You love having me. I could be anyone, really. Now go home!”

“Is there someone else? Is that what this is about?”

“Okay. I'm going to start throwing things now,” Claire says, tossing up her hands exasperatedly before disappearing from the window.

Stephen looks at me. “That's it, isn't it? She's having an affair.”

“That's not it,” I say, shaking my head.

I register a dark blur in the upper corner of my eye and then we both jump as a pair of Rollerblades lands with a hard thud on the grass between us. “Jesus Christ, Claire!”

“No, Stephen,” she shouts down at him. “There's no one else. There has to be someone to begin with for there to then be someone else. And for me, there is no one at all, and that's why I'm leaving you.”

“You're not making any sense!” he cries, approaching the window. Claire drives him back by throwing down the Louisville Slugger baseball bat that Russ has dutifully handed to her. The bat lands on its handle, carving out a fist-sized divot in the lawn.

“Fuck!” Stephen shouts, throwing himself against the wall of the house. “Will you just calm down for a minute!”

“Go home, Stephen. I swear to God I'll call the cops.”

By now I suspect that at least one of the many neighbors standing on their porches watching the spectacle with growing consternation has beaten her to it. Things like this don't generally happen on our block.

Meanwhile, Stephen mutters something unintelligible, pushes himself off the wall, and steps under the window again. “I love you, Claire,” he calls up to her. “I may not be the most exciting guy in the world, but I've always been good to you, and I've always tried to make you happy. I can't make you stay if you're going to leave me, but I think, after six years, that I deserve the courtesy of an explanation. You can throw anything down on me that you want.” He drops to his knees like a dazed fighter in the later rounds, and looks up at her, panting as the tears run unchecked down his dirty, sweat-soaked face. “I'm not going to move from this spot until you come down to talk to me, face-to-face. I'm through ducking.”

There's a moment of dead silence as Claire looks down at him, and then she hurls the desk chair out the window. Luckily for Stephen, it turns out he has one more duck left in him after all. I dive left and he lets out a yelp and rolls to his right as the chair lands with a heavy metallic crunch exactly where he'd been, the wheels and casters flying off in all directions like shrapnel. Rabbits run for their lives, and I wonder why I never thought of an aerial assault before. Stephen lands on his back and lets out an anguished scream that seems to go on until next week, while upstairs, Claire bursts into tears and disappears into the house.

I pull myself to my feet and walk over to Stephen, who is still lying on his back and staring up at the sky in a catatonic haze, the way you do when you're stoned and the clouds start looking like cartoon characters and old girlfriends. I bend down to pick up a chair wheel assembly and then sit down on the grass next to him, idly spinning it in my hands.

“I'm sorry about your door,” he says after a while.

“Don't worry about it, man. You had your reasons. I'm sorry about my sister. That was uncalled-for. Really.”

“She's really leaving me, isn't she?”

“It seems that way, yeah.”

He turns his head and looks at me, his lips quivering with emotion. “Why?”

I rub the cool metal of the chair wheel against my palm and let out a deep sigh. “Because she's Claire,” I say. “And that's what Claire does.”

He considers that for a minute, and then looks back up at the sky, nodding to himself. “I really do love her, you know?”

“I know.”

He gets up slowly, groaning with the effort. His right arm hangs limp, like something vital has been disconnected inside, and he starts limping toward his black Porsche, parked at the curb.

“You sure you're okay to drive a manual?” I say.

He stops and turns around. “No.”

“You want me to take you home?”

“If you wouldn't mind.”

I don't know how to drive a stick, so I take him in my Saab. He'll send someone for the Porsche. When you're as rich as Stephen, there's always someone to send in these types of situations. He sits with his eyes closed in the passenger seat, his head pressed against the window, a low, steady hum coming from inside his closed mouth, like he's singing a duet with the engine. The streets give way to boulevards and then to the highway, and soon we're wordlessly speeding north toward the gilded forests of Greenwich in the loneliest part of the afternoon, just before the light starts to fade. Stephen doesn't wear a seat belt, and I don't remind him to. He looks like he'd prefer to fly through the windshield if we crash, and I know that feeling, I'm one of the founding fathers of that particular feeling. And seeing him like this, so limp and beaten, I feel an unexpected stab of empathy for him. He married the woman he loved, was as good to her as he knew how to be, and still he lost her. It's incomprehensibly unfair, and I know that feeling too. Stephen's only mistake was in thinking that Claire would keep on loving him. It was an understandable mistake, since she'd made it too.

“I feel like I'm dying,” he says hoarsely as I pull through the gates and into the driveway of his Mediterranean-style mansion. Stephen is rich, handsome, and athletic, and it occurs to me that this may very well be the first time he's ever lost the girl. There are tears in his eyes, and as much as I feel for him, I'm the last person he should be talking to about this. Later, he'll regret having let me see him in this vulnerable state, and because he can't take it back, he'll just hate me more for it.

“Look,” I say, throwing the car into park. “I know right now it seems overwhelmingly bad, but you're in shock. I mean, between Claire leaving you and then the baby, it's just a lot to absorb. You need to take your time with this.”

He turns slowly in his seat until he's facing me, and fixes me with a hard stare. “What baby?”

I nod slowly, lowering my head until it's resting on the steering wheel, and all I can think, over and over again, is
Oh fuck.

24

LATER, AS THE DAY DIES, RUSS AND I STAND OUT IN
the front yard, tossing a baseball back and forth in the lingering daylight while Claire screams into the phone at Stephen, who's been calling pretty much every hour on the hour to demand an audience. The block is filled with the muted sounds of suburban evening: crickets chirping, the musical jangle of dog leashes, the muted thrum of central air compressors, and the resounding slap of leather on leather as the baseball hits the woven pockets of our worn mitts. This is usually my witching hour, the time of day when the utter futility of it all threatens to overwhelm me, and by now I'm usually sitting on the porch, three or four swallows into the Jack Daniel's.

I just need a little time to figure this all out!
Claire's disembodied voice, half crying, half shouting, comes floating through the windows and across the yard to us.

“Sounds pretty bad,” Russ says, throwing me the ball. It lands in my glove with a resounding smack.

“It is,” I say, winding up and throwing it back. I overthrow a little, but Russ extends and easily makes the catch.

“Does anyone actually stay married anymore?”

Throw … smack.

“I don't know.” Throw … smack. “It does seem like an epidemic.”

Stop trying to make deals with me, Stephen. This isn't the Middle Ages. You can't negotiate a marriage!

“Do you think you and my mom would have made it?”

Throw … smack.

“I'd like to think so. We had a pretty good thing going.”

“That's true. But then again, you were still in the honeymoon phase.”

Throw … smack.

I stop to think about it for a moment. “It wasn't perfect. I mean, we fought sometimes. Your mom liked to have everything organized, and I was a total slob. And sometimes she got self-conscious about being so much older than me, and I wasn't always as reassuring as I should have been. Sometimes I even teased her about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm an asshole.” I shrug. “I don't know. I guess I liked the idea that someone like her would worry about losing me.”

Throw … smack.

“That must have pissed her off.”

“I think it just made her sad.”

Throw … smack.

“So who knows what would have happened down the road?” Russ says.

You think I like doing this? You think I woke up one morning and said to myself, Today would be a great day to fuck up Stephen's life?

“I think we had a shot,” I say, throwing him the ball. “Your mom had been through a bad marriage already, and it was like she knew where the trapdoors were. There was only one way it would have ended, and that's if I screwed it up.”

Throw … smack.

“And what were the odds of that, right?” Russ says with a light smirk.

“Exactly,” I say, feeling suddenly deflated. I don't tell Russ that I can sometimes recall looking at Hailey and shamefully wondering how I'd feel when she was fifty and I was thirty-nine, wondering if I'd have it in me to stay with an older woman once she was actually old. I don't tell him that there are times, even now, that I experience a dark sense of relief that I will never get the opportunity to fuck things up, that Hailey died before the inevitability of my ruining us, because sometimes it seems inconceivable to me that I wouldn't have. Fucking things up, after all, was what I did. I don't tell him that I am still trying like hell to forget the way she sometimes looked at me, like she was seeing me for the first time and wondering how she'd so grossly overestimated my character. How in those moments I didn't think—I knew—that at some point she was going to get rid of me. There are some things you can never say out loud, even to yourself, sins of the mind that you can only file away in the hopes of absolution at some later date.

For now, all I can do is shake off the desolation that threatens to descend like a sudden downpour, and punch the pocket of my baseball mitt invitingly. Russ grins and throws me a pop fly, and for the next little while the only sounds are the emerging crickets, the ball hitting our gloves, and Claire's intermittent screams. There's something nice about throwing the ball with Russ, and now I understand the cliché about fathers and sons playing catch. We're together and engaged, but far enough away to say personal things without feeling exposed, and for the things we can't bring ourselves to say out loud, we have this ball to throw, and we can hear the neat smack of hard leather on soft and know the message has been delivered.

I'm hanging up now, Stephen! No! I'm hanging up!

“Thanks for talking to Jim,” Russ says. “It's much better now, knowing that I'll be moving back here soon.”

“You're welcome.”

“It's the first time I've felt remotely okay since … you know.”

“I'm glad.”

“So I guess you're my stepfather again.”

“I guess so.”

“How does it feel?”

I think about it for a moment. “It feels okay,” I say.

“Good.”

Throw … smack.