Snapper (21 page)

“Jesus, where’d you steal that?” said Shane at the front door. He meant the wine. He led the way into the house. Valerie had painted a lot before motherhood overtook her. Just before Louis’s birth she had an exhibition in town of nudes painted on old hubcaps. I’m not clever enough to understand why it was brilliant, but it was. Anyway, the interior walls of their house were covered in unicorns and castles and pirate ships, anything Louis was into at the moment, painted straight on the wall in an expert Mommy edition and often a less expert Louis copy. The sofa where I sometimes slept sat beneath an enormous outstretched swan over roiling leaden seas, which always worked itself into my dreams.

“Louis won’t go to sleep,” said Shane, “because Daddy stupidly mentioned that you were coming over tonight.”

We reached the kitchen, where Louis abandoned his plastic
catapult and launched a hug at my leg. Valerie held up greasy hands and said she’d hug me later. She had watery eyes that made her look sad, though she seldom was. She wore a black dress and heels, which surprised me; I hadn’t realized this was an event.

“Louis, get Nathan a can of beer from the fridge, please. Shane, sweetheart, will you please dice that onion?” To me she said, “It’s nothing glam, I’m afraid, just meatloaf and corn bread and salad, but it means you can take some leftovers home.”

“Nathan brought four bottles of wine,” said Shane.

“What is the occasion, exactly?” I said.

“You’re the occasion, man,” said Shane. “We haven’t seen you for a month at least.”

Louis was very considerate; he pulled the tab on my can of beer before handing it to me.

“You have to make your own occasions,” said Valerie, “when you’ve got newborn twins. It’s baby this and baby that all day every day.”

“And then I come home moaning about library politics,” said Shane. Apparently in all times and all places the children’s librarian is the envy of his colleagues.

“The occasion
is
you,” said Valerie. “We want to hear all about something else, anything else.”

I explained from the beginning while Valerie clattered around and Shane got in her way and Louis went back to his catapult. When Shane used to cook he added a single flick of cigarette ash to everything for luck. Now he wore a nicotine patch and told Louis it was his “special Band-Aid.” This had been going on for almost five years, since Louis was born. Everything was in the oven and the mingled aromas of meat and herbs and bread were beginning to fill the room by the time I had finished and explained my feelings about the bone.

“So what do you think?” I said.

“That girl was a cow,” said Valerie.

“Maybe I can work up some overdue fines for her,” added Shane.

“Yeah, but what about the bone?”

“Bone appétit,” said Valerie, laying out steaming meatloaf and corn bread glistening with butter, and drizzling balsamic vinegar over a bowl of fresh spinach leaves with bacon and avocado chunks on top. Shane uncorked Bottle the First, as he called it, and Louis said “Yuck,” though which of these things he objected to was unclear.

It was bone this and bone that all through dinner and three bottles of wine: Valerie was bone-weary from dealing with the twins and Louis had been boning up on his dinosaurs and Shane’s glass was bone-dry. We kept this going long after it had ceased to be funny.

Later, infant howling drifted downstairs, and Valerie excused herself, taking Louis yawning along with her. Shane and I worked our way through the rest of the wine while washing up. He told me that however hard he tried to help, Mom was still Mom, she was still the center of the universe, and things were harder on her. I should come around more often, he said.

Then he changed his mind.

“Have you phoned the guy in Vermont yet?”

“No.”

“You’re probably better off wandering around cemeteries all day.”

“Sure. My parents would completely agree.”

“If I were you, I’d make the call. Can’t hurt to make a call. But if I were me, which I am, I’d remind you that for all practical purposes Vermont is in another galaxy.”

“You could take your whole family hitchhiking,” I said.

I fell asleep beneath that outstretched swan, mulling it over. Vermont might be another galaxy if you have a job and a wife and three kids. All I had was a beat-up coffee table and an old bone.

When Lola told me she was getting married, I told her not to. You can’t be faithful to anyone, I said. I don’t remember saying it—she reminded me over lunch four years after the fact. Of course I apologized. She said not to worry—that she had done so many things she regretted, and perhaps we should both agree that we had sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus in about the year 2000.

She raised her glass and I had no choice but to raise mine.

The restaurant where we lunched had not changed much in the fifteen years since we met there, working in the kitchen. It’s in the Old Post Office, a protected building. The most a new owner can do is reupholster the vast oak booths lining each wall. Around the dining room hang various faux historical front pages:
TITANIC SINKS
, and
BRITAIN DECLARES WAR
. Even those haven’t changed. The clientele was the same—
businessmen sneaking a noon drink and wealthy housewives regrouping for a fresh assault on downtown shops. Our waitress was a slim and diffident girl just out of high school; clearing tables was a young man ignoring the complaints of customers who hadn’t realized that they were finished eating. They could have been us. Outside the window in our booth the sluggish and stubborn Ohio lay where it has lain, I wanted to point out, since long before Zeus was born.

Lola asked what I had been reading lately. It was a strange question, as though we met up every week or every month. She lived in Michigan and I lived in Vermont. I returned to Indiana as seldom as possible. My parents had sold my childhood home, full of stairs, and moved into a low-slung ranch house suitable for aging in. I couldn’t stand to be inside it; opening windows was forbidden because it disrupted the calculations of a comprehensive heating and air-conditioning system. My mom kept the blinds down most of the time anyway, and the house felt to me like a mausoleum. They had an ample backyard with shade trees and a comfortable porch, but they had no furniture out there because they didn’t use it. The move did not seem to affect my parents much. Once a week Dad fetched an armful of downmarket thrillers from the library, and read them every night, lamenting the decline of plot, coherence, and grammar. Mom stayed on top of various book club recommendations. I was floored when she told me that as an undergraduate music student her favorite writer was Zola. I came to visit about twice a year. There’s a week in May and about two in October when Indiana slips on a nice dress and calls you sweetheart for no good reason. Vermont just takes your cash and shows you straight to the ski slope.

I said I had read nothing much recently and Lola began objecting to something she calls the Oprah Effect, a recent
flood of what she calls mawkish memoir. She is an English professor now, and I suppose publishing fads are an occupational hazard.

“People tell me I should write a memoir,” she explained, “because I’ve had five stepfathers. But that doesn’t make me automatically interesting.”

Privately I disagreed with that. Number four offered her cocaine when she was eleven years old. She enjoyed it, too. Number three used to knock her mother around until Lola, age ten, phoned the police. Her mother never forgave her for it. Number two was an alcoholic pool shark who dragged her, illegally at age eight, every afternoon and evening to the kind of ramshackle establishment where he could earn his keep, as he put it—though in fact he was wagering the child support money paid by number one.

I used to speculate that perhaps in a childhood peppered and plagued by stepfathers she learned very early how to please individual men according to their own particular caprices. I could never test this hypothesis, of course—never sit down with her and some other beau over dinner to watch them interact. But I remain convinced that it was this essential responsiveness, this eagerness to please, that also made her first a diligent student and even, later, an exceptional scholar.

Anyway, I must have known that any groom she chose would be moody and domineering. When her marriage collapsed, two years before we had lunch in Evansville, she telephoned me. It has always been her voice that gets into me without warning—that I can’t defend against. It is surprisingly soft and low, a confidential rasp. On the occasion of that phone call in particular she spoke urgently.

“Nathan,” she said, “you were right.”

I had no idea what she was referring to. I only found out over lunch two years later that she meant my cruel prediction. It would have been wrong to ask at the time—to interrupt her confession, whatever it was, with a demand for details, dates, and times. I had said any number of things to her over the years, many of them gloomy and pretentious. She has even now an uncanny ability to quote things back to me I would rather not hear.

I simply held the phone to my ear and asked her to continue. She explained cryptically, without comment, that she was losing her surname.

I listened not so much to her words as to her sweet gravel voice. I had not heard it for a couple of years. When we were undergraduates she used to talk enthusiastically about early matriarchal societies while I sat back admiring her legs. Perhaps I did not know Lola then as well as I do now, although we live thousands of miles apart with our own separate careers and families, and we correspond sporadically at best. Back then I was too distracted by that voice, especially when it crinkled into a giggle unchanged from childhood, by her copper hair and calm blue eyes, and by her face, which suggests a Native American ancestry she doesn’t have. These days she complains that her profile looks every day more like Thomas Jefferson’s on the nickel, but she is still beautiful, and she knows that.

“I was quite offended,” she said over lunch, “but knowing what you did of me at that time, I can see why you said it. And you were right.”

Then came her quiet retaliation.

“I had some difficulty back then,” she said, “distinguishing between friends and lovers.”

Lola is now married again—it’s his second marriage,
too—and she is the stepmother to his daughters, who are eight and ten. I have never met him, but Google describes him as a pioneer of online insurance sales. This has made him wealthy, but I cannot believe that a man of any spirit could stoop to an occupation so tedious.

More offensive to me is a photograph Lola e-mailed of a recent Christmas. They are all in her mother’s living room. Lola and her mother are wearing festive dresses, Lola’s brother is wearing a tie, and the little girls have ribbons in their hair. I suppose it is Lola’s latest stepfather behind the camera, and I don’t know what he looks like. Eric, her new husband, however, is seated at the end of the couch nearest the camera with his legs crossed at the knees and one bare foot projecting into the room. That foot becomes somehow both the foreground and the focal point of the photo; it has the lurid gloss and closeness of things seen in dreams. Eric himself is unkempt and unshaven, with a belly that begins at his sternum, wearing shorts and a faded athletic T-shirt. But it is the naked foot thrust in front of everything else that speaks loudest: here is an overgrown adolescent who ignores the customs of another home and makes it his vulgar own.

Lola is a year older than I, and we met in the summer after her freshman year of college and before mine. We had never met before that because she went to a West Side high school where all the students got stoned during lunch hour. I went to an East Side high school where the English teacher got stoned during lunch hour and afterward abandoned the curriculum to share his passion for Bob Dylan and William Blake. He would lend any student anything from his record collection or his extensive library and not really expect it back. Later he
was fired for giving cans of beer to students who came to his house to listen to bootlegs after school. That was probably the end of meaningful education in Evansville.

We spent our free afternoons that summer on the crumbling remains of a World War II shipyard over the river, five minutes’ walk from the restaurant. What purpose our haven served in the manufacture of warships I don’t know. It was essentially a vast concrete box directly fronting the shoreline; in the rain you could sit inside with a fire going. If a bottle, bucket, log, basketball, prosthetic limb, hat, Barbie doll, or child’s car seat floated by we’d throw rocks at it. The river is cleaner now. There was graffiti everywhere, and beer cans and candy wrappers, yet we seldom came across other people. Some friends of mine were responsible for that graffiti: on reading
Beowulf
, Peter had spray painted a monstrous severed arm above the words
GRENDEL LIVES
. In a city of 130,000, only a dozen or so people would have understood that. Elsewhere there were quotations from Andy Warhol and J. D. Salinger; gnarled curious faces adorned the interior walls, and outside austere spray painted depictions of the heads on Easter Island warned the uninitiated away.

We generally sat on top, and sometimes we waved to the men working on coal barges bound for Pittsburgh or Memphis. Some of those barges are a quarter of a mile and more in length. I wanted to do that, I said, just like Mark Twain. Lola told me an uncle of hers had taken that job, the only thing he could get when he was released from prison. Three months later he lost a leg between two immense coal-heaped iron sledges.

We talked endlessly about ourselves and watched the sun falling slowly into the Ohio. I discovered that she was receptive to cheap romantic flourishes and soon we had olives and
grapes and wine and volumes of poetry with us. My English teacher had pressed Yeats on me urgently, and I never knew why until I read it to Lola. I do not mean that she was suddenly, tritely smitten. Both of us were more than that, swept away and possessed by the lofty ideas therein, what Lola called the nobility of joy and by the unanswerable need to rediscover the “old high way of love.” These are not sentiments that sprout naturally by that mindless shining river in the subtropical summer heat, but by moonlight we sought out every shadowed corner, every neglected wood, any private place, where the only sound came from timid river waves. I am not sure that is what Yeats had in mind, but it worked magically for us.