One Last Thing Before I Go (2 page)

CHAPTER 3

H
is habit is to while away the depressing afterglow of his sperm deposit at The Last Page, a large independent bookstore in the quiet downtown area of Elmsbrook. He generally sits in the store’s small café, reading
Rolling Stone
and drinking a large soda, replenishing his fluids while he waits.

Lily arrives at a quarter to three, her long hair haphazardly tied into a loose ponytail knot that is already coming undone, blondish wisps spilling out and trailing her like a comet’s tail. Her hair has been dyed different shades of blond for so long that it has lost all genetic memory, so that her visible roots aren’t so much dark as confused. Her black tights are tucked into black cowboy boots, and her lean torso swims in a loose-fitting cardigan the color of dirt. She wears her guitar on her back, neck up, in a soft black case, like a ninja sword.

Silver watches her closely from his perch in the café. Imperfections abound: her prominent forehead, her small fighter’s nose, a misaligned lateral tooth. But the overall package has a pleasing composition to it, a fractured beauty that lingers for him even after she has moved past him into the Children’s Books section.

He loves her as much as any man can love a woman he’s never spoken to, which is significantly more than you’d think. It’s a pure love, epic in its own way. If the situation called for it, he’d step in front of a speeding bus for her. The only other person he would ever do that for is Casey, his daughter, whom he imagines might actually enjoy the spectacle. In eighteen years, he hasn’t exactly proven himself in the father department. The sad truth is, dying for Casey might be his only shot at redemption, and even then he doesn’t think it would help his case very much. Any idiot can die, right?

He moves furtively through the aisles of books like a shoplifter. He can already hear the soft sounds of Lily’s guitar, punctuated by the occasional hiss of the espresso machine in the book – store’s café. She plays this gig twice a week, for the handful of three – and four-year-olds who sit in a small circle around her low styrene chair, sipping at their juice boxes and singing along while the assorted mix of nannies and au pairs chat softly amongst themselves in island dialects.

Silver stands in the Self-Help aisle, where he can listen without alarming anyone.
Thirty Days to a Flat Stomach
,
Eating Your Way to a Thinner You
,
The Self-Esteem Workbook—
a billion-dollar industry built on the questionable notion that people can be fixed. He pretends to browse while he watches Lily play. Her whole body moves as she strums, her light hair falling over her face like a curtain, and then she looks up at the kids and starts to sing.

The cat came back / the very next day / The cat came back / we thought he was a goner / but the cat came back / He just wouldn’t stay, away away away yeah yeah . . .

There is no way to explain this. It’s an inane kids’ song. And her thin voice wavers on the high notes and occasionally runs flat. But she sings with passion, like it’s a raw and earnest love song, her deepest pain set to music. The ridiculous song is much too small to contain her energy, and so it spills over, filling the room, filling him. The kids sing along tunelessly with the chorus—they’ve been here before—but her voice rises above them and floats around the ceiling fans of this scrappy little bookstore still clinging fiercely to life in the digital age. He can feel the familiar lump forming in his throat, the paradoxical sense of having lost something he never had. By the time she hits the third verse he is undone.

The man around the corner swore he’d shoot the cat on sight / He loaded up his shotgun with nails and dynamite / He waited and he waited for the cat to come around / Ninety-seven pieces of the man was all they found . . . / But the cat came back . . .

Every so often, clarity washes over him in a wave, drenching him with realizations and reminders of what he’s lost and who he has turned out to be. He lurks there, beyond help in the Self-Help section, a middle-aged mess of a man with restless legs, ringing ears, and an aching heart, fighting back the tears elicited by a woman he’s never met singing her heart out about the attempted murder of a cat.

* * *

The way he sees it, he’s teetering on that edge. By his estimation, he’s got maybe one last shot at any kind of real and lasting love, and that’s before you take into account his warped and deeply compromised faculty for it to begin with. He has loved more women than any man should. He doesn’t so much fall in love as dive-bomb it like a kamikaze pilot, fearless and at full throttle. He used to look at this propensity as a gift, then a curse, and now understands it to be just another way in which he is broken.

He’s been alone for a long time now, more than seven years. At some point, loneliness becomes less a condition than a habit. In time, you stop looking at your phone wondering why you can’t think of anyone to call, stop getting your hair cut, stop working out, stop thinking that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life. Because tomorrow is today, and today is yesterday, and yesterday beat the shit out of you and brought you to your knees. The only way to stay sane is to stop hoping for something better.

But there’s still something in him, a small pocket of insurgency that hasn’t fully conceded. There’s a part of him that still believes she’s out there, the woman who will see the man behind this shifting, splitting land mass, the woman who knows exactly what to do with the hopeless paradox of a kamikaze lover like him. And he knows that’s the part of him that has to finish dying if he’s ever going to sleep soundly again.

* * *

The first girl he ever loved was Sofie Kinslehour. She had a pixie haircut and a pink, horn-shaped birthmark on her neck, and the first time they kissed, she let out a small moan that conveyed a world of carnality he had only vaguely intuited up to that point. They were sixteen years old, in a dark corner of the parking lot behind the high school—there was a game of some kind going on—and when she moaned, he heard himself answer in kind, like she’d woken something up in him he didn’t know was there. She pressed the full length of herself against him, opening her mouth to accept his tongue. For the next few weeks, she occupied him like a conquering army. At home he tugged on himself so furiously and so often that at one point he feared real and lasting damage. When they were together they kissed themselves raw, until their lips were swollen, flaking husks, their tongues charley-horsed. And then, one day, it ended. He doesn’t remember the salient points, but statistical evidence and the cold spasm of regret in his belly whenever he thinks about it assure him that it was he who blinked first, who found a random flaw in her to cling to until it swallowed him whole.

CHAPTER 4

I
t’s summer, the air thic
k with that virulent East Coast humidity that shortens your breath and dampens the back of your shirt as soon as you step outside. He is sitting with Jack and Oliver in their usual chairs by the Versailles pool, trying, like everyone else, to look like he isn’t looking at the college girls.

Or maybe they are college women? He doesn’t know. They defy categorization, this gaggle of bronzed, bikinied students, stretched taut like pulled taffy on lounge chairs near the deep end of the pool. He is sitting in his usual spot between Jack and Oliver, catty-corner to the girls, pretending to read a magazine. All around the pool, other men sit, alone and in clusters, and they are all the same, all sad and depleted, abusing themselves with stolen glances at forbidden fruit.

“Will you look at those girls,” Jack says, probably for the third time. Silver tends to tune him out.

They don’t need him to tell them. They are men after all—not the men they once might have been, and not the men they maybe could be—but men, after a fashion. And these girls, these women . . . well, they glisten with nubile perfection under their SPF 15, baking their soft, unblemished skin to a honeyed glaze as they read from textbooks and tabloid magazines, tap away at texting devices encased in pink and red rubber, or listen to their iPods, their bare, manicured feet twitching to the music. They do that thing with their lips that girls do when they feel the music, puckering their lips, kind of kissing the air as their heads bob up and down.

The pool is supposed to be exclusively for residents of the Versailles
,
an efficiency hotel just off the interstate, but the girls come daily as Jack’s guests, and no one ever complains. They come from Hudson College, situated just four blocks away on the other side of Route 9. The semester is just starting up again, and the proximity of so many young, ripe women to a place like the Versailles
is like keeping your matches and blasting caps in the same drawer.

Yes, he is living in an efficiency hotel. Mistakes.

The Versailles
,
a drab monolith that rises like a tombstone fourteen stories above the sailor’s knot of parkways and connecting ramps that feed into I-95, is the only apartment building within the Elmsbrook city limits. Years ago, it was converted into a residential hotel, where rooms can be rented at a weekly or monthly rate. As such, it has become the inevitable destination of all the sad, damaged men of Elmsbrook, banished from their homes in the wake of disintegrating marriages. An aura of failure hangs over the place—middle-aged men living on their own in small, sparsely furnished, subdivided hotel rooms. “He’s living in the Versailles
,
now,” people say, and everyone knows exactly what they mean. It is
that
building. The pool, the gym, the concierge, the plush lobby furniture; none of these amenities can obscure the fact that this is a place where broken men come to lick their wounds as the battles over marital assets and custody arrangements are slowly lost at a rate of roughly six-fifty an hour plus expenses.

In the framed architectural drawing that still hangs in the lobby, the building is rendered in a soft white that glints in the sun, surrounded by emerald lawns and a lush canopy of ash and oak trees. But the zoning board required a larger parking lot, so the lawn and trees and the little kids flying their red and yellow kites never made if off the drawing board, and the diesel exhaust rising off the nearby expressways has gradually turned the Versailles into a vertical slab the color of a thunderhead. It’s hard to fathom the logic of displaying this picture of the building in all its unrealized splendor, someone’s idea of a cruel joke, maybe, a blunt metaphor designed to effect a kind of subliminal torture on the residents.

Back when Silver was married, the building, in better shape then, was still something of a punch line, fatuously tacked onto the end of arguments.
“If I’m so horrible, why don’t you just move out? I’m sure there’s a vacancy at
the Versailles
 . . .”
Like that. Cut to seven years later and here he is, the sum total of his existence confined to a two-bedroom efficiency eight floors up, alongside his brothers in arms, the men exiled from Elmsbrook’s tree-lined residential streets, from the carpeted and curtained warmth of solid, creaking Tudors and colonials, stripped of marriage and family but still paying for it in ways large and small. Paying the mortgages on houses in which they are no longer welcome, paying for their ex-wives’ new wardrobes and haircuts and facials and body waxings and gym memberships, all to tone, smooth, and buff bodies that they no longer get to touch, paying for the personal trainers who are probably fucking their wives and for their wives’ lawyers who are fucking them, and for their own lawyers who seem powerless to do anything about any of it except explain in lay terms exactly how they’ve been fucked. Paying for Little League and soccer and piano lessons and ice-skating and karate and Gap Kids and private school and speech therapy and tutoring and after-school programs and health insurance. Standing in the lobby, you can feel the building vibrating with the collected agitation of desperate men living in a constant state of subdued panic, in a permanent frazzle, avoiding bank statements, selling off dwindling assets, knowing that they can only keep this colossal mess aloft for so long before the whole thing comes crashing down in a miasma of courtroom vitriol and bankruptcy.

And so the men of the Versailles
,
brothers in disgrace, reach out to one another in the invisible ways that men do, and small, fragile friendships of convenience form like desert moss. They bitch and moan to sympathetic ears, preaching to the choir about the courts, the antiquated laws, the goddamn fucking lawyers, and this new, enforced, seemingly insurmountable poverty in which they have all landed. And when they aren’t bitching, they try like hell to believe that this isn’t a permanent state of affairs, that they can and will find love again, that they won’t die alone, that they will have some version of sex in the near future. But in the meantime, they will mope, drink to excess, and stare at women of an inappropriate age, searching for the silver lining, wondering when the perks will finally kick in.

* * *

Which brings us back to the college girls.

“I mean, just look at them, would you,” Jack says.

Jack is handsome in a manner that allows him to get away with this unabashed leering. He is tall and slim, built for shirtless lounging, with dark, wiry hair and the dimpled chin of a superhero. He and Silver had been casual acquaintances in their old lives, part of a loosely associated ring of husbands and fathers connected less by genuine friendship than by the friendship of their wives. And now they are connected by their absence. No one was happier about Silver’s divorce than Jack, who practically did a jig right there in the lobby when he took up residence in the Versailles.

“You look at them,” Oliver grumbles from beneath the crumpled baseball cap resting on his face. “I’m napping here.”

Oliver is in his late fifties, tall and beefy with loosening skin, tired eyes, and an ocean of whiskey under his belt. He is one of the few men who doesn’t have to live there; he is rich enough to live anywhere, really, but he likes the camaraderie. He has been married—count ’em—three times, has grown children who don’t speak to him, grandchildren he has never met. Oliver is fourteen years older than Silver, and Jack is an oversexed misogynist, but somehow, in a way he couldn’t retrace if he tried, they have wordlessly become a unit.

And here they lie, every day baking in the sun: Jack, long and lean, only now beginning to lose some of the definition in his abs and chest. Silver, thickened everywhere, like an aging baseball pitcher, and then Oliver, long gone to seed, his sagging beer gut rounding him out into something vaguely pear-shaped. Jack and Oliver are like Before and After pictures, and he is the softening middle stage, the moment it all went wrong.

“Sure, there’s the obvious,” Jack says, ignoring Oliver. “The anatomical advantages go without saying. But go deeper. Look at their eyes, the way they move, the way they laugh. They’re brimming with this . . . unspoiled sexuality. They still love men. They’re at least a thousand fucks away from the bitter, cynical women they all eventually become.”

“Or one night with you.”

“Ah, fuck you, Oliver.”

“They’re kind of young for you, aren’t they?” Silver says.

“Fuck no,” Jack says. “Who do you think is going to gratify these girls, college boys? Think back to when you were twenty. Sure, you were a walking hard-on, but were you any good? Did you really know how to please a woman? Did you even care to? No, all you knew was where to stick it, and nine out of ten times, you were finished before she’d even gotten started.”

Silver thinks of a girl, he can’t remember her name, lying beneath him in the sweaty confines of her cramped dorm single, her wide eyes looking up at him with unrestrained desire, and he feels something he’s become accustomed to lately, a dull, humming grief for all the things he can never get back.

“Forget what you think you know.” Jack is gathering momentum now, which is never a good thing. “These are not the girls you and I went to college with. This is an evolved species. They love sex. They love it and they want it, and they feel it’s their inalienable right to have it. These girls are feminists, God bless ’em.”

“Will you quit speechifying?” Oliver says. “I’m trying to relax over here.”

“Come on, Oliver, you know you’d take any one of these girls. A bottle of wine, a couple of Viagra, you’re good to go.”

Oliver pulls the cap off his face and squints at Jack. “But would any one of them take me?”

“What are you talking about? You’re a handsome man.”

“I am old and fat, and I survive by knowing my role in the jungle.”

“And what’s that?”

“The rich old toad who pays to occasionally have his cock munched,” Oliver says, pulling his cap back over his face. And right at that moment, Silver thinks, there is something vaguely toad-like about him.

The girls stretch and roll on their chairs, expertly opening the clasps on their bikini tops to avoid tan lines. They swing their legs, they rub lotion into their cleavages, lick their lips, play with their long hair. Jack lifts his Ray-Bans to squint at them, then laughs at the wonder of it all. “God in heaven,” he says.

Oliver farts, long and high, like air escaping from a pinched balloon.

“Christ, Oliver, take a pill,” Jack said.

This is what passes for his friends these days.

* * *

They are still sitting there, two hours later, when Casey shows up. The sun is high above them, the smell of tanning oil sizzling on the skin of the college girls wafting across the pool to tease their senses. Heard from a certain vantage point, the tractor-trailers thundering down the interstate can sound like the pounding surf. Silver is, as he so often seems to be these days, adrift in a hazy fog of memory, fantasy, and regret.

“Silver.”

And maybe, on his better days, the faintest glimmer of hope.

“Silver!”

Casey is walking purposefully toward him, in shorts and a breezy halter top, her almond-colored hair pouring down her back and billowing slightly in the faint summer breeze. As she gets closer, he can see that her face is lightly dusted with a horseshoe-shaped constellation of freckles. Jack grunts, making a big show of not checking out his friend’s daughter.

“Hey there,” Casey says with that jaded nonchalance she reserves exclusively for him. As always, in the first instant he sees her, he can feel his heart suddenly shut down, the way you do in those first moments after impact, or, he supposes, when you’re drowning. Love or panic. The two have always been fairly indistinguishable to him.

“Hey, Casey.” He sits up in his lounge chair, suddenly self-conscious of his rolling gut, his unshaved face, the haircut he’s been meaning to get. “What are you doing here?”

She smiles as if his question has triggered a private joke. “What indeed?”

It will surprise no one to learn that he has not been anyone’s idea of a model father. In the seven years since his divorce he has missed, by design or neglect, more than his share of birthdays, recitals, varsity games, and more dinner dates than he dares to recall. His relationship with Casey gradually evolved from playful to strained to distant, and once puberty had had its way with her, her once habitual forgiveness became somewhat more elusive. He knows this is all his fault, knows he deserves far more contempt from her than she is capable of, but still, there’s something about hearing your little girl look down her nose at you and say “What indeed?” that makes you feel fractured beyond repair.

Casey looks them over, and he can see them through her eyes; Jack, the aging lothario, coasting on a witless charm that started to fade sometime in the late ’90s; Oliver, doughy and dour and old enough to be her grandfather; and himself, sweating through an extra-large T-shirt commemorating a band that stopped being cool before she was born. Her eyes briefly flit over to the college girls, then back to them with a cynical gleam and they are busted for being the sad, drooping ball sacks that they are.

It’s hard to get up smoothly while simultaneously straddling a lounge chair and sucking in your gut. He achieves verticality, but only after some graceless jostling with inertia, and somehow this simple effort leaves him flushed and breathless. The Versailles
has a decent gym, and with all the time on his hands, you’d think he’d have wandered in there by now.

He kisses her cheek. She doesn’t cringe outwardly and he is ridiculously overjoyed.

“Look at you,” Jack says to her. “How old are you these days?”

“Eighteen.”

“Wow, that makes me feel old.”

“No, I think it’s probably your age that’s doing that.”

“Shazam!” Jack says. He does that sometimes. They don’t know why.

Casey rolls her eyes, essentially negating Jack’s existence, and looks at Silver. “I need to talk to you.”

“Is everything OK?

She appears to contemplate that for a moment. “Everything is peachy.”