The Realm of Last Chances (10 page)

Matt pulled his apron off and hung it on a wall peg. If this had been a scene in one of his three aborted novels, he probably would’ve made the character based on himself say something about how, if he was so bad for business, he’d gladly bow out and find work elsewhere. But this wasn’t a novel, and nobody would knowingly hire someone who’d embezzled thirty-five thousand dollars from his former employer. Only a special kind of fool did that.

He walked up to the front and stood beside Frankie. “Therefore you intend to administer shock therapy. Throw me in a pot with my ex-wife and my replacement, in front of an audience, and for good measure you’ll have Dushay standing by with his mother, to remind me I don’t even have a shoulder left to cry on and had better start trying to find one. You’re really something, you know that?”

The Zizzas lived just off Montvale Avenue, about halfway between Main Street and I-93. When Matt parked at the curb and got out, it was raining as hard as it had been all day. A hurricane, supposedly too far out at sea to cause major damage, was lashing the Cape right now with sixty-mile-an-hour winds
and torrential rain. Locally, the meteorologists were forecasting evening downpours and flash flooding.

He reached into the backseat and pulled out a sack that contained a bottle of wine, some petunias he’d brought for Andrea and an envelope with Frankie’s birthday gift: two tickets to see the Pats’ home opener against Rex Ryan and the hated New York Jets. He walked across the yard to the door and rang the bell.

Andrea opened it. A tall redhead who’d always worn far too much makeup, she had a hard face with deep worry lines departing from both corners of her mouth and long red fingernails too thick to be real. Matt knew she didn’t like him. He wasn’t crazy about her either, which made it all the more puzzling that suddenly—at the exact moment he heard his ex-wife say, “Frankie, you are absolutely outrageous”—he wished Andrea Zizza would pull him close and kiss him.

He lifted the petunias out of the bag and offered them to her. She didn’t take the bouquet, just stared at it. “Who’s that for?”

“You.”

“Oh. Well, thanks.” She held the flowers at arm’s length, as if she thought they might be poisonous. “I’ll get a vase for these,” she said, then nodded toward the dining room. “All the hoopla’s in there.”

Despite never having been a dog lover, he understood their use as props. Zizza’s mutts, Eddie and Wolf, were smelly, flea-addled creatures who barked too much and stole food, but when he walked into the dining room he dropped to a knee, grabbed Wolf around the neck and whispered, “Hey, boy, how you doing?” The dog’s long pink tongue, smelling suspiciously of mortadella, mopped his chin. He wiped it off, then stood to face the jury.

As odd as it might sound given the town’s size, he’d never seen Carla and Nowicki side by side until now. Yet there they were, at the far end of a table loaded down with cold cuts, salads,
chips and dips. Paul had his arm around her shoulder, his fingertips gently massaging her rotator cuff.

As a literary construct, love at first sight had always seemed problematic, the fallback position of bourgeois nineteenth-century writers whose characters were prohibited by social mores from doing anything except sitting in drawing rooms, sneaking peeks and sighing. But Matt had loved Carla since the moment he first saw her in the hallway between classes at Montvale High. She was wearing a pair of Jordache jeans and a
Flashdance
shirt, and her hair was pinned with banana clips. She came toward him, hugging a copy of a magazine.
Wine Spectator
, he saw when she got closer.

She was pretty, but so were others. She was smart, but back then she didn’t read anything serious and listened to awful music by people like Teena Marie and Cyndi Lauper. Her standard grade was B minus, and when he finally asked her out he discovered she had no plans to attend college, that she hoped to open a wine-and-cheese shop someday in Arlington or Belmont or some other tony suburb. While none of this made her more interesting to him, that didn’t matter when he was sixteen, just as it wouldn’t matter when he was twenty-six or thirty-six.

Now her eyes—big and round, accentuated with just the right amount of eyeliner—were again meeting his. And when they did, several things happened. Nowicki’s face colored and he removed his hand from her shoulder. Carla’s mouth dropped open, and Dushay’s mother put her hands over her ears and said, “Oh, my!” Dushay lost his grip on the broccoli sprig he was about to scoop up dip with and dropped it in the bowl. One of Frankie’s neighbors whispered, “Jesus H.”

Zizza grabbed a wad of napkins and ran toward Matt, who was puzzled until he felt the liquid trickling out of his nostrils, over his lips and down his chin. He didn’t bother looking at the front of his white polo shirt, because he knew what he’d see there. He’d seen it before. And so had Carla.

•  •  •

Despite having catered countless parties over the years, the Zizzas didn’t seem to know how to throw one. There was no music, and conversation had started to lag. Everybody was just standing around, Matt holding a Kleenex to his nose now and wearing an aloha shirt that Frankie’d bought last year in Hawaii. It was an awful sight—yellow, with brownish-green palm trees in the foreground and behind them, in silhouette, a bunch of surfers hoisting boards on their shoulders as they trooped toward the ocean. Inside it, he felt like a scarecrow.

The Zizzas, the Nowickis and Mrs. Dushay had gone into the kitchen, where they stood looking out at the backyard. The wind had picked up and was whipping the trees, the windows of the old Victorian coming alive with sighs and groans. The rain was falling hard now, blown across the yard in silver waves.

“I know two different guys,” Matt heard Dushay tell another guest, “that got personally killed by Whitey Bulger.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. And I’m even related to one of them. He was just my uncle by marriage. But still.”

Carla emerged from the kitchen and walked over to the end of the table, where Matt was using his left hand to spoon potato salad onto a small plate. He didn’t want to risk taking the Kleenex away from his nose; he thought he’d finished bleeding, but you never could tell.

“How have you been?” she asked. She pulled the spoon from his hand, stuck it into the potato salad, lifted out a big clump and deposited it on his plate. “Want any more?”

“This isn’t what you think,” he told her.

“What’s not?”

“The nosebleed. God knows how that happened. I’m clean, Carla.”

“I know you are.”

He didn’t see how she could, since she’d barely been close enough to even wave at him for at least a couple of years, and he said so.

She pursed her lips like she always did when someone said something stupid. He’d always called it making a duck face, or just making a duck. “You’ve never understood what it means to really know somebody,” she said.

It occurred to him that this might well be true and could account for his failure to get very far with his writing. How could you write about people if you didn’t know them? But what he said was, “I’d like to think I know you.”

“I know you would.” She glanced at the kitchen, then reached up and, as if it were something precious and fragile, took the Kleenex from his hand. She looked at the three or four gobs of blood on it for a moment, then stuck the tissue in her breast pocket and fastened the button.

The critical point at which he would turn from a solid to a permeable substance seemed at hand. He was losing viscosity. Everybody’s body betrays them in the end, and his had gotten the jump on him tonight. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m horribly sorry about what happened to us. What I did to us.”

“I know you are,” she said. “But you’re not dead yet, Matt. You know what I mean? There’s still this thing ahead of you called life.” She picked his plate up and handed it to him. How many times had she done that before? He used to go a day or two without eating anything at all while she tried her best to force-feed him. And what dishes he’d passed up then: braised rabbit cacciatore, potato gnocchi with chanterelles and pancetta, veal piccata, braciole.

Loss was a sickening sensation. And no matter what he gorged on nowadays, he’d never make it go away. That might be the one important thing that he knew and she didn’t.

He set the plate back down just as Andrea came out of the kitchen carrying a chocolate layer cake with flaming candles
forming the numbers 4 and 1. “Okay,” she announced. “Time to sing. Gather around.”

So everybody assembled around the table and sang “Happy Birthday,” and the most surprising thing about it was Dushay’s beautiful tenor voice, which soared operatically above their grating chorus. He sang with his head held high, arms at his sides, as if he were onstage someplace like Jordan Hall and perfectly at peace in such surroundings.

When they finished, Frankie closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked straight at Matt, and in that instant his old friend knew what he’d wished for, that massed hopes were headed toward him, whooshing out over the cake and mixing with a few flecks of spit to extinguish the candles while everyone cheered.

During the opening of gifts, as Frankie feigned outrage at Dushay for giving him a ridiculous male thong with the Pats’ logo on the crotch, Matt slipped away. Broken branches littered the Zizzas’ yard, now more of a marsh, the water two or three inches deep in many places. He picked a path through the downpour to his car. Soggy leaves covered the windshield, so he had to stand there getting drenched while he cleared it.

A light pole, snapped in half, was down in the middle of Montvale Avenue, a team of guys from NSTAR hovering around it, shouting instructions at one another. He backed up, wheeled into a side street and wove up the hill to Main, dodging a couple of trash cans rolling across the pavement. The center of town was dark, but when he turned onto East Border Road, he again saw lights.

The house was humid and miserable—his mother had never installed central air, and he couldn’t afford to either—so he left the front door open while he went upstairs and pulled off his wet clothes, tossing Frankie’s awful shirt into the washer. He climbed into the tub, lifted the diverter, then grabbed his
pliers and twisted the exposed stem to turn on the hot water. While showering, he kept thinking of that instant when Carla put the bloodstained Kleenex in her pocket. Turning his back to the spray, he pressed his face to the wall, nearly overcome by an urge to pound his forehead to pulp on the tile.

When the water grew lukewarm, he turned off both faucets, stepped out and toweled dry. He had no idea how to spend the rest of the evening. He hadn’t finished the last two books he’d started reading, and he’d forgotten to put any movies in the Netflix queue. The most exciting possibility was probably the Weather Channel.

He put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went back downstairs. He was in the kitchen, rummaging through the refrigerator for a beer, when someone rapped hard at the front door. The rain was still pounding down, and the only person he knew who might be nuts enough to go out in it was Frankie. He hoped to God his friend hadn’t come to fetch him. After a while it became annoying, not to mention humiliating, for someone else to remain so focused on your well-being when you had done your best to destroy it.

Through the screen door, he saw his neighbor Kristin. Her soaked hair fell over her eyes, and her mascara had started to run, leaving squiggly lines on both cheeks. The wind had worked over her umbrella pretty good, inverting it and breaking a couple spokes.

“Hey,” he said and unlatched the door. “Come in. Everything okay?”

“Not exactly.”

She told him she’d gotten home late. They’d had meetings all day, and then her bus flooded out, and after that, on the Haverhill Line, a fallen tree blocked the tracks. “To make matters worse,” she said, “my husband’s down in Providence tonight. He went to hear the Tony Rice Unit.”

“Who?”

“They play bluegrass,” she said, waving off further questions. “So I got home, and when I walked into the kitchen I heard running water. I checked the half bath, but it wasn’t there. So I went upstairs and looked around and everything seemed fine. I couldn’t even hear the sound anymore. And so then I—”

To save her the trouble, he said, “It’s your basement.”

“It’s filling up. There must be half a foot in there already. I don’t know where it’s coming from—I didn’t want to wade down into it—but it sounds like there’s a broken pipe.”

“I doubt that.” He opened the door to the hallway closet, though he hated for her to see inside it. Whatever he lacked a hanger for, he’d thrown on the floor. He had to paw through a pile of coats and rain gear to find his winter boots.

As he took a seat on the bottom stair and began tugging them on, she examined the hallway. “That’s a nice antique,” she said, gesturing at the grandfather clock that stood at the far end, near the kitchen door. “Where did you get it?”

He was lacing one of the boots. “Belonged to my folks,” he said. “It’s been there as long as I remember.”

“So your parents lived here?”

“Yeah. This is the house I grew up in.”

“And you moved back after …”

“That’s right—I moved back after. You ready?”

She nodded, so he grabbed a big umbrella and a flashlight, and they went outside. Crossing the street, he held the umbrella over their heads at an angle to prevent the wind from destroying it.

“You never think about hurricanes hitting Massachusetts,” she said.

“If you live here, you do. One of them flattened a good bit of the North Shore back in 1938. Tore the roof off my mother’s house.”

“That house back there?”

“No. It’s over on Pond Street. My uncle lives in it now.”

While they walked, she held his right elbow. He noticed she wasn’t wearing boots, just a pair of black leather pumps. If she intended to stay here, she’d need some new clothes. He bet she didn’t even own a good coat. In California, she probably never needed one.

When they got to her driveway, he remarked that her husband’s paint job looked great: the exterior of the house was now ocher, with gleaming white trim. He’d noticed him up there on the scaffold, working all day long for nearly a week. In late afternoon he always pulled his shirt off, and he didn’t look nearly as gaunt then. He packed some serious muscle. “Must be nice,” Matt observed, “being married to a guy who knows how to do stuff like that.”