The Realm of Last Chances (12 page)

For an instant, Vico’s face froze as if in a fit of palsy. Then he laughed. “None of us are socialists either,” he said. “That’s just a mistaken notion a lot of people around the country hold about this state. Myself, I tend to vote Republican, but my buddies, they go the other way. Got an ex-cop in our group and a retired coach from Montvale High, and both of them used to be in a union. I give ’em a little hell about that from time to time, and they give me hell right back. See, I’m a retired CPA, did their taxes year after year, so they know
I
know the score. Our cop buddy routinely—
routinely
—took home a hundred forty, hundred fifty. Pulled so much overtime you wonder when he had a minute to eat or take a crap. Ever notice when there’s road work, maybe a couple of public-works guys patching a pothole, you got a pair of cops standing around in those slime-green vests, slurping Dunkin’ D and pretending to direct traffic? That generates overtime, and state law says you’ve got to have ’em. But I don’t call it socialism. I just call it two cops standing around getting paid for drinking coffee.”

Panic was starting to set in, a feeling of claustrophobia, of being caught out and observed and bent to the will of another.
“Listen,” Cal told him, “I need to dig some holes. It’s supposed to rain tonight.”

“See you tomorrow,” Vico said, turning toward the BMW, which he’d spend the next few minutes unloading, toting boxes of wine, bags of groceries and a pot of daffodils into his house.

that evening
Kristin arrived home late again, at half past seven. He could tell from how she sank onto the couch, leaning back against the cushions while rubbing her eyes, that something was bothering her. A different sort of husband might have asked what it was, but he didn’t. If she needed to tell him, she would; if she chose not to, that was her business.

“I finished the fence,” he said.

“I noticed,” she replied, though he knew that was untrue. If she had, she would’ve said so right away. She’d always been appreciative of his efforts to keep everything in good shape, properly maintained. Her first husband hadn’t been able to do anything around the house. If the toilet was stopped up, they had to call a plumber. And he usually left the call to her.

“It looks great, Cal,” she said. “Really.” She asked then if he’d made anything for dinner, and he apologized, asking if maybe they could eat out. He’d only completed the fence about half an hour earlier and barely had time to take a shower.

“That’s fine,” she said. “Why don’t we try that Mexican restaurant down on Main Street in Cedar Park? The one the Realtor told us about?”

“I don’t know about eating Mexican food in Massachusetts. I doubt it’d measure up.”

She mentioned some vice president—of communications? Finance? Cal couldn’t keep them all straight, didn’t care to. “He says it’s really excellent, and he knows good Mexican food. He grew up in the Imperial Valley.”

He acquiesced, in part because he wasn’t hungry. The conversation with the retired accountant had been troubling him all day. The longer he worked on the fence, the angrier he
became. His worst fear about living here was coming true. The houses stood too close together. You couldn’t escape scrutiny. Pass gas and somebody’d hear it. The thought made him so mad he hit a picket too hard with his hammer and split it right down the middle.

El Gallo Fino stood on the corner, in a building that wasn’t quite orange and wasn’t quite pink. It might’ve been a dress shop at some point, since there were two display windows large enough to accommodate seven or eight full-sized mannequins. Fortunately, the tables nearest those windows were occupied. If asked, Cal would never have agreed to sit there.

The hostess, who at least appeared to be a Latina, wore a braided chignon, a Puebla dress and a gauzy shawl with floss embroidery. She led them past the bar, where several drinkers sat sipping margaritas, and through the crowded restaurant to a corner table. Handing them each a menu, she told them to enjoy their dinner.

Kristin watched him cast an eye around the room. Except for one Asian family, everyone there was white and well dressed, lots of guys with loosened ties, as if they’d just arrived back in the suburbs from whatever Boston brokerage or law firm they worked for. The Mexican murals would strike him as stereotypical. Too many cacti on display, along with one sombrero-wearing peasant leading a donkey loaded down with mangoes. Ordinarily, she would have filled the silence by explaining how perfectly awful her day had been, that her stomach was churning so badly that she’d bought a packet of Rolaids in Andover and chewed them on the platform, not noticing the milky film at the corners of her mouth until Matt, who’d appeared unannounced, pointed it out. She’d told him about her day when they stopped for a couple martinis in North Reading. That made it hard for her to tell Cal anything at all, as did the fact that she’d insisted Matt drop her three blocks from the house,
so it would look like she’d walked from the station if her husband happened to be outside.

Cal opened the menu, examined it for a minute or two, then laid it down. “ ‘The elegant rooster,’ ” he said. “That’s what the name of the restaurant means. Although you can also translate it as ‘the fighting cock.’ ”

“Sounds like a pretty big difference.”

“Not really. It’s mostly just a matter of the bird’s mind-set.”

A waitress appeared and placed a bowl of chips on the table, then asked if she could start them off with drinks. Cal ordered a Corona but told her not to stick a lime wedge in it. Kristin thought of another martini, then hesitated and said she’d have a glass of Cabernet. After the young woman left, Cal asked if anything interesting had happened at work, posing the question in an offhanded manner that suggested an answer in the affirmative was unlikely if not impossible.

That afternoon, following lunch at the faculty dining hall with the provost and the director of institutional advancement, she’d returned to her office and logged into her e-mail. Her inbox was full of the usual detritus: communications from the athletic department about upcoming soccer matches and volleyball games, a reminder that all full-time employees needed to attend one diversity workshop each month, messages from students complaining about professors and from professors complaining about administrators, an invitation to the library’s biweekly brown-bag lecture—this week’s entitled “Ruminations on the Cape Town Climate Conference.” She scrolled through them quickly, deleting all but a couple, then logged out and, giving herself no chance to reconsider, typed
umich.edu
in the browser’s address bar. From the University of Michigan’s home page, her heart pounding, she navigated to the English Department and clicked on
PEOPLE
.

And there he was.

It had been years since she’d seen Philip’s face. She’d gotten rid of every photograph of them together, as well as all those she’d taken of him alone. He’d aged—of course he had, since everyone does—yet the damage displayed on her LCD made her recall an article she’d seen the other day in the
Globe;
underneath a photo of a badly breached breakwater wall in Gloucester, the headline announced “The Battle Against the Sea Is No Contest.” Phil’s chin, once so well defined, had merged with his neck, the skin on his jaw had grown flaccid, his hair was completely gray and, though he’d once bragged it would always remain thick, had thinned considerably. You couldn’t see much more than his face and the top of his torso, but the bunched fabric around his shoulders made it clear he was wearing a hoodie. One thing, at least, had not changed.

He’d been wearing one the first time she saw him, on a bench in front of the Bull’s Head Bookshop at the University of North Carolina. She wouldn’t have given him a second glance were it not for the book in his hands, a paperback of Alfred Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz
. Seeing a guy who dressed like he did holding that, you couldn’t help but stop and stare. In addition to the hoodie, which read
OLE MISS
across the chest, he had on threadbare jeans and a pair of cowboy boots.

He looked up before she could look away. “Have you read this?” he asked, flourishing it. “Or just seen the movie?”

“I read it in Continental Fiction. I don’t think I could survive a fifteen-hour film.”

“I’d go see it,” he said, “if I lived anyplace where they showed it.”

It had played at a Cleveland art house when she was an undergraduate, but she’d passed up the opportunity even though her favorite professor said it was one of the three or four greatest films of all time. “Do you like the book?” she asked.

He shrugged. “It’s got its virtues, though you can’t escape the fact that it’s warmed-over Joyce.”

She’d been in graduate school for all of six weeks, living by herself in a tiny studio in Carrboro, in what was shaping up as the worst period in her life. Her father had called several times, but she kept hanging up on him, so eventually he quit. Her mother checked in every few days, though her voice sounded as thick as if her mouth were full of peanut butter, and most of what she said made no sense. Sometimes Kristin didn’t even bother to answer the phone.

He scooted over, so she sat down on the bench. “Döblin claimed he hadn’t read
Ulysses
,” she told him.

“Faulkner said the same thing from time to time, but I’ve seen the dog-eared copy he had in his library. While he claimed to be influenced by Döblin, there’s no evidence he ever read him. Anyhow,
The Sound and the Fury
came out the same year as
Alexanderplatz
, which didn’t appear in English until 1931. And Faulkner couldn’t read German.”

“Are you in graduate school?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen you sitting in the critical-theory seminar. You didn’t look particularly engaged.”

They’d been plowing through an anthology of works by Jameson, Derrida, Cixous and de Man, and she had yet to understand a single line of what she read. The course was required for all new comp-lit grad students. “I wouldn’t say I’m exactly overjoyed. I like novels and poems, and so far we haven’t read any.”

Comp lit was more theoretical than English, he said, but he didn’t like his classes any more than she liked hers. When she asked if he planned to become a Faulkner specialist, he laughed and said he wouldn’t be caught dead doing that. He told her he didn’t like bourbon, either.

What he did drink, she discovered that evening at a place called the Four Corners, was lots of beer. Specifically, Pabst Blue Ribbon, the cheapest brand on tap, a big frosty mug going for a dollar twenty-five. The pub was jammed with loud
male undergraduates watching the World Series, both Philly and Oriole fans, and occasionally they jeered one another as if they were participants rather than observers. Later, she came to think it appropriate that their first evening together began in a contested environment.

When it came to books, he talked a great game. He’d grown up in a small Mississippi town, but he preferred Elizabeth Bowen to Eudora Welty and was a lot more interested in Ford Madox Ford than Robert Penn Warren. He’d read foreign authors she’d only heard of, like Ignazio Silone and Theodor Fontane, and he knew much more about poetry than she did. He was thinking of writing his dissertation, he said, on Pound or Eliot. Unfortunately, she’d always been attracted to slim guys who displayed a certain degree of taste when it came to food and clothing. Phil had the build of a linebacker, the position he said he’d played at Ole Miss, and he dressed like he was getting ready for a rodeo. He ordered a greasy hamburger for dinner along with French fries that he doused not in ketchup—that would’ve been bad enough—but mustard. Yet this naked disregard for social niceties might have been his most beguiling trait.

After their third or fourth beer, she asked, “Do you like the taste of this stuff?”

“PBR?”

“Yes.”

“Not really.”

It reminded her of castor oil, and she said so.

“Beats the hell out of the stuff I’ve got back at my place,” he told her.

“What’s that?”

At the time he was sporting a beard, so she couldn’t tell if he was blushing when he dropped his gaze to his mustard-streaked plate and said, “There’s only one way to find out.”

He had an entire house to himself, a boxy little prefab in a cul-de-sac off East Franklin. As he unlocked the front door, he
said signing the lease on the place had been a terrible mistake. The monthly rent ate up half his assistantship and didn’t even include utilities.

“Why’d you do it?”

“Living in an athletic dorm for four years is like being in a zoo, except animals behave better. Guys would flip out the lights when you were in the shower and squeeze off a few rounds from a .38. Or they’d put a dead rattler in your bed. I wanted some peace and quiet.”

When she stepped inside, she experienced a shock. She’d expected a mess, not a sparely furnished but spotless living room. A love seat and sofa, a teakwood table, a single standing lamp with a white bell shade, a wicker basket full of newspapers, all of them neatly stacked. No TV, no stereo. “My grandmother bought me the furniture as a graduation present,” he said. “It was marked down after being damaged in the Pearl River flood.”

She followed him into the kitchen, which had a small Formica-topped table and a pair of ladder-back chairs. He opened the fridge and pulled out two white cans on which the word
BEER
appeared in black letters. “Generic suds,” he said, handing her one. “This makes PBR taste like Lafite Rothschild.”

They went back into the living room and sat down on the couch. He kicked off his boots and put both feet on the coffee table. “See the water stains?” he asked, pointing.

She wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, but there were a couple amoeba-like spots. “That doesn’t look so bad,” she said.

“It looks like hell, but I don’t care. To me, this is the lap of luxury. I’ll have to live someplace cheaper next year, but I’m keeping all my stuff.”

On his couch, time crawled and conversation moved in a circuitous fashion, just as it used to with Patty Connulty. She learned that his mother worked for the health department, his father delivered propane for a petroleum company,
and most of his clothes had been bought by his grandmother, who favored polyester and rayon over cotton because they were “man-made.” He’d been a great high school football player—first team all-state, with six scholarship offers from Division I schools—though in college his interest in it declined as his passion for literature consumed him. From his sophomore year on, he just went through the motions, serving as scout-team fodder to keep his scholarship. He did most of his reading in library carrels because teammates ridiculed him when they saw him with a book of poems in his hands. An assistant coach who badly wanted to get rid of him wrote doggerel and taped it to his locker: