The Last September: A Novel (15 page)

“I won’t be on the market for a few years, at least,” I said. “And who knows, maybe we’ll end up staying here. It’s where my research is. There’s plenty of time to work all that out.”

Charlie hedged. He said that he’d never finished culinary school. He didn’t know anything about business. Since we’d been together, he’d worked odd jobs, mostly painting, occasional handy work, his culinary abilities displayed only in our apartment. Like now, the only light the tapered candles he’d lit. A white tablecloth over the folding card table that composed its own tiny little dining room between the kitchen and living room.

“Well,” he said, swirling the wine in his glass, the first sign of capitulation. “It
would
be fun to check out the competition. Go on dates.”

So that’s how we spent the money at first. We had to buy clothes, so we could arrive suitably dressed at all the best restaurants in Amherst. Trips to Boston and New York, too. On an October trip to New York, at La Grenouille, the waitress came to our table. Older than both of us, she was lean and almost professionally fit—I could see fine cords in her arm as she turned over our water glasses. She barely looked at me, but when Charlie ordered a bottle of wine, she complimented his choice, then reached over and righted his suit coat collar, which I hadn’t even noticed was slightly turned up.

Charlie didn’t act surprised at all. He leaned back a little in his chair and looked down toward the fixed collar, then back at her. “Well, thank you,” he said.

“Helpful when I can be,” she told him. Her face was still turned away from me, so I couldn’t see her expression, but her white blouse was open at the collar and a blush sprouted, splotchy, at the base of her neck.

“Look at you,” I said to Charlie when she walked away. “My Last Duchess.”

“What’s that?” Charlie, innocent, took a sip of water.

“ ‘A heart too soon made glad,’ ” I said. “It’s a poem. By Robert Browning.” Though it was the waitress, and not Charlie, who had blushed, I added, “ ‘ ’Twas not his wife’s presence only, called that spot of joy into his cheek.’ ”

“But it is,” Charlie said, leaning toward me, eyes twinkly and intent, but most of all convincing. Any flutter of jealousy instantly tamped down. Then he said, “I remember that poem. He’s looking at a painting, right? Of his wife? Didn’t he kill her?”

“That’s the most common interpretation,” I said. “Did you read it?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I remember the discussion in class.”

“Charlie,” I said. “I can understand not reading a whole novel. But a poem? You didn’t even read a poem?”

“It’s a long poem,” Charlie said, with a blameless shrug.

I started to say something else, but the waitress returned with the wine. Charlie leaned back, that same motion, but this time was careful to keep his eyes, his smile, on me, even when she showed him the label, and poured the smallest bit for him to taste. After dinner, we went back to our hotel, and I think it may have been that night, careless on our travels, that Sarah was conceived.

IF I HADN’T PRESSED
him, if I hadn’t foisted the money on him, what would Charlie have done that year while I was pregnant and finishing my course work? In hindsight, cooking in someone else’s restaurant would have made a lot more sense. Charlie was good at food, but neither of us had a head for business. When we were done splurging on research trips, we splurged on a space downtown on Main Street. We figured we’d get foot traffic first, word of mouth later. Sometimes I thought we were being adventurous and savvy. Other times I thought we might as well have loaded up my inheritance in his mother’s old car and driven down the highway with the windows open, bills fluttering out into the wind.

It was Gift of the Magi. I thought I was giving Charlie this extraordinary opportunity, his own restaurant, while he went along with it only to please me. Both of us waited for the other to be grateful. When Charlie told me he wanted to call the restaurant the Sun Also Rises, I said, “You know that novel takes place in Pamplona. This is a literary town. People will expect Spanish food.”

A warm night in April, we were sitting in the new, empty space at a table in front. Through the large front window, we could see people walking past, some still clinging to sweaters, some already in summer clothes. Charlie had a stack of résumés and was taking notes on a yellow pad. I reminded myself that I’d never seen him work so hard. He was trying.

He said, “It starts out in Paris, doesn’t it? And doesn’t everyone always think of Hemingway in Paris?”

I placed hands on my pregnant belly and cocked an eyebrow at Charlie. At this point he may have discovered Google, but I still hadn’t seen him read a novel other than
Riddley Walker
. He put down his pencil and said, “I’ll add some tapas to the menu.” Obviously nothing I’d said would dissuade him from the name he’d chosen. His phone buzzed from underneath the sprawl of paperwork. Charlie had to shuffle through the mess to find it. As soon as the person on the other end started talking, his face went grim. I knew without asking the topic if not the speaker. Eli.

“Oh my God,” I said when Charlie hung up before he could even fill me in—always a different version of the same disaster. “I can’t handle this right now.”

“Sorry,” Charlie said, a new hard edge in his voice. “I’ll tell my brother he has to have his psychotic breakdown when it’s more convenient.”

“You could call your father,” I said. “Let him deal with it for once.”

Charlie pushed his chair back and went toward the kitchen. Not quite ready to run after him, I pulled a résumé off the top of the pile. Deirdre Bennet. I scanned the page as if I’d have something to do with the hiring, then put it aside. I could see the restaurant was a mistake before it had even begun.

The baby did a startling kick, followed by a roll. I put my hand on my belly, trying to locate the foot, feeling protective and guilty at the same time.

CHARLIE CALLED HIS FATHER,
who didn’t offer to go up to Boston. “Keep me posted,” Bob Moss told him. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me: for Eli, it was us or no one. Charlie and I went to visit him in the lockdown ward at Beth Israel. They had to buzz us through a series of glass doors. When we finally got inside, all the patients’ eyes turned toward me, my swollen belly a lightning rod of possibility, normality, voodoo. I waited for someone to call out, predict the baby’s sex or more, but no one came close, or spoke, except for Eli. His nicotine-stained fingers hovered just above my belly, not yet quivering from the meds and not quite willing to make contact, just testing the force field that emanated from his little niece—almost but not quite in the world with us.

We sat down with him at a table in one of the visiting rooms. Eli drummed his fingers on the tabletop.

“How are you doing?” Charlie asked.

Eli glanced at him angrily. “How am I supposed to be doing?”

I thought he was going to complain about his hospitalization—his incarceration—but instead he launched into a theory about how Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1967 and Billy Shears had taken over his life. “It’s the most successful case of identity theft in human history,” Eli said. His voice sounded fast, lower pitched, each word spilling into the next.

“Oh, Eli,” I said. Charlie looked at me, his face fallen the way it always did when faced with this version of his brother.

“What is this preoccupation,” Eli said, “this obsession with orgasm?” He waved his hand at my belly as if it represented the entire problem. “Because that’s not the thing, right? That’s not the peak moment. It’s the moment before that’s the whole point. That’s why I shouldn’t be rushed along, when I’m the one who’s paying, I shouldn’t be forced to indulge in the cheapness, the ending. There’s the reason they call it the little death, you know, it signifies the end of pleasure, the end of
feeling
.”

“Can I get you anything?” Charlie said. “Do you want coffee or anything?” I wondered if they were allowed to have hot liquids, but Eli didn’t seem to have heard him anyway.

“It would be a very different world,” Eli said, “if the sexual revolution had gone the way it was supposed to. If Paul McCartney had lived. Or if they’d just left well enough alone and not brought in that asshole Billy Shears, with his fucking violins and trombones.” He lifted his arms and pounded the air as if playing an invisible drum set. “Aw,” Eli sang, in a sharp, angry voice. “ ‘How do you sleep? How do you sleep at night?’ ”

We sat with him for a minute after that, none of us speaking, until Eli turned to me and said, in an almost normal tone, “They took my dog. Can you see if you can find her for me?”

That night, Charlie and I had an infant CPR class at the EMH. We drove back to Amherst and spent the evening practicing resuscitation on fake babies with open mouths and collapsible necks; a nurse walked us through the various situations of peril we might expect to encounter. By the time we finished, it was dark. We walked outside, the summer air heavy on our shoulders. Charlie placed his hands on my stomach, which had swollen well past the point of no return.

“I don’t think we can do this,” Charlie said. In another frame of mind, this statement might have worried me. But I just leaned my head into his chest. I felt exactly the same way.

First thing the next morning, I called shelters in the Boston area and found Eli’s dog, Lightfoot, at the Animal Rescue League in Arlington. They said she had fleas and a mild case of heartworm but otherwise was in surprisingly good spirits and shape. She was a nice dog, a little Italian greyhound mix Eli had adopted from Angell. I brought her home with me until they let Eli out ten days later.

“It’s not long enough,” Charlie said, lying across our bed, hands covering his eyes. Lightfoot jumped up on the bed and peered worriedly into his face. Charlie had spent the past ten days giving interviews, finding suppliers, writing menus—and also traveling to Boston for commitment hearings and visits with Eli. It seemed like every time Eli was committed, they kept him for a shorter time, which translated into a shorter time before his next break. Charlie put one broad hand on the dog, half petting her, half pushing her away. He looked ragged.

“Eli will be back in the hospital in a matter of months,” he said.

I sat down next to him and placed my hand on his forehead, as if he were a child home sick from school. Sometimes when Eli broke down I wished that he could stay in a hospital forever, sparing the rest of us. When he was better—medicated—the wish that he would stay that way was mitigated by our knowledge that that would never happen. The fog of complying with the meds would wear him down, he would quit taking them, and the voices would rise. The cycle would only continue, and no one but Charlie had the wherewithal to withstand it, and believe in him, one more time.

ELI RECLAIMED LIGHTFOOT AND
went back to his job. I wrote him a check from our dwindling account so he could move into a new apartment. Meanwhile the restaurant started to look like a restaurant. Charlie hired his staff, among them an artist who helped him out with decorating before starting as hostess when the restaurant opened. In mid-May, we went to one of her openings. She was showing at the McCewan gallery with three other painters. She’d already worked with Charlie for a couple weeks, but I’d been too busy grading to come by the restaurant. At this point my one nice maternity dress was straining enough that I worried my popped belly button was visible through the stretchy black cotton. The space was brick-walled, one large and airy room, and everyone there held a plastic cup of wine.

“Go ahead,” Charlie said as he poured a cup of red for himself. “What does it matter at this point?”

I shook my head, more from not wanting people to glare at me than worry it would do harm to the baby. Charlie glanced around the room and said, “We’ll just say hi and look at her paintings. We don’t have to stay long.” Then he smiled at someone in the crowd, jutting his chin in her direction. I couldn’t tell whether the gesture was meant as an additional greeting, to her, or for me—pointing her out.

A woman glided through the crowd, her arm outstretched to me way too early. I guessed she was a couple years younger than me, fair and elegant. Despite her jump-the-gun greeting, there was something preternaturally contained about her, and I thought Charlie had chosen just right. We’d learned from our travels the importance of having a coolly beautiful woman to greet customers, one who knew how to dress and carry herself.

“Brett,” she said. “I’m Deirdre Bennet.” I remembered her name from the résumés. Deirdre went on, “Charlie has told me so much about you. I’m so happy to meet you.”

A broad, aggressively handsome man appeared and introduced himself as Deirdre’s boyfriend. My fingers folded in on themselves when he gripped my hand.

“Come on,” Deirdre said, closing her hand around my wrist. “I’ll show you my work.”

I let her lead me across the room. Watching her tiny waist, swathed in a shimmery Asian-style dress, I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Rosemary Hoyt in
Tender Is the Nigh
t
: “When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of her back.” By the time we got to the wall where her paintings hung, I felt tired and elephantine. Deirdre’s work was all portraits. To me, the colors felt too garish, the brush strokes too visible. I leaned forward to read the cards that listed the price and title of each painting. The names sounded vaguely familiar:
Susan Smith
,
Céline Lesage
,
Andrea Yates
.

The boyfriend, seeing my mental struggle, piped up. “They’re women who killed their kids,” he said, enthusiastic, as if this were the happiest news in the world.

Deirdre let go of my wrist. “I’m obsessed with infanticide,” she told me.

Putting my hands on my belly would have seemed defensive, so I resisted that impulse. When Deirdre and her boyfriend filtered back into the crowd of well-wishers, I slipped my arm through Charlie’s.

“That,” I said, “was a very odd thing to say to a pregnant women.”