The Fun Parts (17 page)

“Guns?” called a tall fellow with a can of dip. He was a theater jock from Texas, which meant he affected flasks and went bare chested under his pleather vest.

“Put those away,” said Brianna. “Davis, this is not funny.”

“It’s just a game. They’re not loaded.”

“What game?” said Brianna.

“Come, Princess,” he said to me. “I mean, Countess. Choose one.”

“You’re drunk,” said Brianna.

“Somewhat. Also stoned. Why do we even say stoned? So brutal. So Levitical. Pick a pistol, dreamboy. We’re going to play out that scene for our friends here. From the Pushkin.”

“And then will you can it?” I said.

“Like Steinbeck.”

“Goddamn ridiculous.” I hardly looked at the pistols, drew one from the box, took a position near the stereo. The girl who stood there smirked.

“They’re not loaded,” I said.

“Bummer.”

I shrugged, raised the pistol at Davis.

“Did I grant you first shot?” said Davis.

“I’m following the story. I’m the young, handsome soldier everyone has left your orbit to be near. You are the older, bitter officer who can’t compete with my charisma.”

“Funny,” said Davis. “Not exactly as I saw it, but I admire your hustle. You framed the scene first. We’ll go with your version.”

“It all fits, Davis. You called for the duel. You’re the crack shot. I’ve never even fired a gun.”

“True. Well, on with it, then. You may have the first metaphorical shot, you upper-crust social usurper. Just flick that safety off.”

“What about the tangelos?”

“My poor father has a little tree. Now take your shot.”

Our audience, stymied in their lust, groaned at our stagecraft.

I grinned and pulled the trigger. Davis fell back with the bang. There was a neat hole in the drywall.

“Shitsnickers!” called the kid with the dip.

Brianna swayed in shock. The goblin squealed under the table, and the girl by the stereo clutched her ears.

Powder smoke hung in a clot. The room hummed with vanished noise. We stood there, grave and giddy.

I shook, and laid the pistol on the coffee table. My stomach cramped, and I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to see the body. I started to move, but Davis popped up, waved his Beretta.

Brianna swooped in and wrapped him in her arms.

“Baby,” he cried. “Was that dramatic? Was it worthy?”

“Are you hurt?”

“Not a scratch! How did it look?”

“It was radically trangressive,” she said. “Of something.”

Davis nuzzled his lady, shoved her away.

“Now we must complete this man deed.”

“No,” said Brianna. “No, sweetie. The piece landed perfectly. Don’t fiddle.”

“It’s okay,” I said, lighting a Korean cigarette I’d mooched from a pack on the table.

“It is?” said the girl by the stereo.

“Davis’ll put one in your frontal cortex,” said the Texan.

“No, he won’t,” I said.

“You going to duck it like Davis?” said the goblin.

“Just watch.”

Davis hocked a loogie and leveled his gun. The room got quiet. Davis winked, lowered the Beretta.

“No, no,” he said with the quiet and cadence of a maestro. “I think I’ll take my shot another day. I think I’ll wait. Until our friend here is a little older. When he’s lost his bunnylike nihilist strut. When he’s discovered love. When he’s struck a truce with feeling. When his every thought and action isn’t guided by childish terror. When he’s graduated from douchebaggery. When he truly understands all that he’s about to lose. Let’s forget these shenanigans for now. Just a little show. But you, buddy of my heart, you’d best watch the ridges and the roads. It could be years from now, but watch for the ragged rider’s approach. He comes only for his shot.”

“And … scene,” I said. We’d taken some drama classes together. The others clapped hard for our skit, or the oratory, really. Davis, wasted in the right ratios, was a natural. We both took a bow.

*   *   *

I had one of those phones that did everything, but I could never master the simplest apps. Every time I tried to add to my schedule, these words would flash on the calendar display: “This appointment occurs in the past.” I grew to rely on the feature. It granted me texture, a sense of rich history.

I was remarking on this to Davis in the midtown diner where we’d agreed to meet. I suppose you could call it a retro diner, but what diner isn’t? They’re all designed to make you think fried food won’t kill you because it’s the 1950s and nobody knows any better, and besides, there’s a chance you haven’t been born yet.

We dug into our bacon and cheddar chili burgers. I watched Davis chew.

He didn’t look sick at all. He was still ugly but a good deal less so. Some men get handsome later. It’s up to them to make it count. He’d replaced his granny glasses with modish steel frames. He looked scientific, artistic, somebody trained to talk to astronauts about their dreams. He eyed me over his drippy meat.

“That’s funny,” he said. “I could look at your phone, maybe fix it.”

“No,” I said. “I like it that way.”

We were silent for a moment.

“So,” I said. “The ragged rider.”

“Indeed.”

“You look fantastic. I thought you’d be much more winnowed.”

“It’s not that kind of disease.”

“What kind is it?”

“We’re still working on that. The doctors.”

“I’m sorry. Whatever it is.”

“It’s in the blood. They know that. I’m sorry, too. But at least it’s given me an excuse to gather my old friends.”

“We haven’t talked since—”

“Since graduation,” said Davis.

“No,” I said. “That other time.”

We’d run into each other in a cocktail lounge in San Francisco several years after college. Davis wore a suit of disco white and toasted the would-be silicon barons at his table. I, assistant manager of this spacey blue sleazepit for the young and almost rich, sloshed Dom in their flutes. Davis slipped me some cash and a wink, but he flailed in a world beyond his code capacity. His group appeared composed of algorithmic gangsters, expert wielders of their petty and twisty Jewish, Welsh, Cambodian, Nubian, and Mayan brains. They hadn’t spent their undergraduate years soused, brandishing pistols and theory. They’d been those morose, slightly chippy bots I’d noticed at the refectory whenever I rolled in for some transitional pancakes after a night of self-bludgeoning. They were churls with huge binders, and I’d always known they were my betters.

“Be honest,” said Davis at the bar. “Are you gunning for maître d’ or is this research for a screenplay?”

“I’m trying to pay my rent, sycophant.”

“We were like brothers.”

“Cain and the other one.”

“That’s true. So what’s your life plan?”

“Drinking,” I said. “One day at a time.”

“These people here think I’m Swiss,” said Davis. “They think I have Ph.D.s in cognitive science and computer engineering. There’s a serious tip involved if you help maintain my cover.”

“What’s the angle?”

“I need them to work for stock options. I’ve got a start-up. It’s called the Buddy System Network. You become friends with people online, share your opinions, your stories, put up pictures. Only connect, right? What do you think?”

“I think you’re a freaking crackpot. Your idea is ludicrous. People aren’t machines.”

“If you’d read more great literature, you’d know that machines are exactly what people are.”

Now, as we sat in the diner, Davis—the new, dying, steely, reframed Davis—dragged a waffle fry through his chili burger sauce.

“So what have you been doing?” I said, thoughtless as usual.

“Right now I seem to be dying. Before that I was looking to break into your line of work. Sponging off wealthy women. My tangelo flow isn’t what it used to be. The economy mugged the Davis dynasty. Come to my place tomorrow, will you? It would mean a lot to me.”

*   *   *

That night, back in my shimmering crypt, I called Martha in Michigan.

“This is crazy,” I said. “Let’s patch it up.”

“You turd, I’m married again.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Scott. How well does he grill?”

“We’re vegans now.”

“No dairy?”

“Kills the sex drive.”

“So that’s what it was.”

“No, honey, it was other things with us.”

“How’s your mom?”

“Let’s not revisit that incident.”

“Incident? Try era.”

“I’ve got to go.”

Down in the hotel bar, I thought of how much Davis and I still had to discuss. Our friendship, for example, and how quickly we’d passed through each other, from fascinated strangers to loyal chums to relics of each other’s worlds. We’d been pawns of proximity, choiceless as brothers. I’d always sort of hated him, really, his arrogance, his masks, his whispery fake ways with my mind. I’d been nothing to him, just his handsome stooge, a barker for his depraved tent.

Now, I could tell you my family history and you could do some amateur noodle prods, conclude I needed one such as Davis to salve my certain hurts. Was it the time my mother beat my hands with a serving spoon while I stood enchanted by the ripples in her gray rayon blouse? Or the occasion my father recited a limerick that began “There once was a dumb fucking boy / who was never his daddy’s joy”? Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake.
Why
won’t save you, anyway.
Why
makes it worse. And Davis, I realized, he wasn’t sick.

He was sick.

*   *   *

I took the train and then the bus to his place in Red Hook. He lived in a refurbished ink factory. I pushed through the iron doors and climbed the stairs until I saw a metal plate with Davis’s name on it. This building, he’d told me at the diner, was owned by rich artists who rented cheap, unsafe spaces to poor artists. Davis had a good deal with these slumlord aesthetes.

His apartment, empty and unlocked, was a great cement room with high windows. Greasy carpets covered the floor. A pair of half-shredded cane chairs and a stained divan connoted a parlor. I recognized all the furniture from the old days. He’d added nothing. Even the stereo had survived.

Davis appeared in his doorway. “Everyone’s up on the roof, kid. Follow me.”

He led me up a narrow ladder to a nearly nautical hatch. I popped through after him, my chin at tar level, surveyed the roof scene—so many pasty, dulled versions of the people I’d known, our old audience, and strangers, too. Caldwell the goblin had gone waxen and squinty. The Texan, dipless, had a tidy potbelly. He sported a polo shirt and unsevere trousers, golf philanthropical. The girl who once stood by the stereo was now a woman who hovered near a hooded grill. It resembled a Greek design I’d coveted from catalogs back in Ypsilanti. I could smell the seared tuna smoke, the zuke-juice vapors. Davis pulled me from the hatch, led me to the sawhorse bar. We had vistas of city and sea.

“My friend will have the rum punch,” said Davis to the teen boy with the ladle.

“Okay, Dad.”

Davis pounced on my surprise.

“You bet your life I have a magnificent son. This is Owney. Eugene Onegin Davis.”

“A pleasure.”

“You’re doing the math, but I’ll save you the trouble. Especially you. She drifted away from both of us that fateful night. But we crossed paths in Marfa years later.”

“She?”

“She,” said a voice. A dark, glitter-dusted hand brushed my shoulder: Brianna.

“So, you two are…”

“God, no,” said Brianna. She still had the heart-threshing looks, the wicked corneal glint of a serious reader. “We still care for each other, and we both love Eugene, but our affections have relocated.”

“Well phrased,” said Davis.

“So,” I said. “How are you dealing with the illness?”

Brianna looked baffled.

“Great news,” said Davis. “I’m not terminal. That’s you, I’m afraid. I’m going live forever. I’ve gotten my hands on some black market Super Resveratrol. I’ll tell you, some of these scientists become dope slingers just to keep their three houses going. But no, I’m fine. How was I going to get you out here? For my shot?”

“Your what?”

“Please, you’ve already figured it out, I’m sure. Down deep”—he poked my chest bone—“you must have understood exactly what was going on.”

“I don’t have much of a deep down.”

“But remember, this can’t work unless you know what you will be missing.”

“The future?” I said, and broke from his grip.

“What can’t work?” said Brianna.

“Nothing, sweetie.”

“Brilliant Brianna,” I said. “Did you know I was married? The union didn’t last. I couldn’t forget you. I sexed it with the mother, though. That was tender.”

“See, that song won’t pass the audition,” said Davis. “I have to know I’m ventilating a contented man. Otherwise it’s a mercy job. So you’ve drifted a bit. Lived with uncertainty. You’re a student of life. You’re the eternal student. You should have lived centuries ago in Germany. Besides, you’re a stud, my man. Women want to make love to your sunglasses. It’s always been that way. You’ve pursued and overtaken happiness. Maybe you’ll suddenly decide to make a ton of money, find a beauty to bear your children. This life, it’s all so exalted, so tremendous and full of wonder, and also relaxing. Are you with me?”

“I’ve just been running from anything that resembled revelation. For twenty years I’ve been running.”

“Nonsense,” said Davis. “You have friends. You have health.”

“I did quit the cowboy killers,” I said. “And you and me, we had a ball, just hanging out, talking.”

“I didn’t like you,” said Davis. “Go another way.”

I stepped forward and stroked his lapels. He shucked me off.

“You condescended,” said Davis. “Acted like you were killing time until a better life came along.”

“You never cared for my ideas,” I said, and snatched his hand, kissed his knuckles.

“What ideas?”

“Not ideas. Something. I’ve blocked most of it. Our whole friendship is a blur.”

“I remember every microsecond,” said Davis.

“It’s really good to see you,” I said.

“Fetch the party favor, Owney.”

The boy reached under the bar for the mahogany box. Davis lifted out the Beretta.