The Realm of Last Chances (14 page)

As he stood there holding her, he believed he understood what had happened to her. Moving across town is traumatic enough. Moving across the continent, leaving all her friends behind after losing her job, probably called everything into question. She must have lost interest in her husband. The guy seemed nice enough, if a little dry, but he was large and ungainly and had a ghoulish quality—as if, though obviously still alive, he really ought to be dead. Matt wondered if maybe he’d fought in the First Gulf War. He looked like a man who
might have taken a life or two and in the process surrendered a chunk of his own.

As for himself, Matt Drinnan was undergoing the acute physiological distress that results from touching a grown woman. Two minutes earlier, he’d found her annoying. Now he was clinging to her like Gorilla Glue.

“That book,” she said. “Why did you give it to me?”

His right hand began to caress her spine. “Because it’s a good book.”

Over the droning sound of the sump pump and the chugging noise of water rushing through a hose, she said, “Remember that passage about what happens when we quit longing for joy, how our lives are almost over? ‘One day we wake up and rub our eyes and do not know why we have woken. We know all too well what the day offers: spring or winter, the surface of life, the weather, the daily routine. Nothing surprising can ever happen again.’ ”

He broke the embrace and stepped back as far as he could without falling into the water. The opening at the top of the stairwell framed her perfectly.

“I’ve probably made you think I’m crazy,” she said, gazing down at him. “We don’t even know each other.”

“We know each other better than we did a few minutes ago.”

She wiped the smudged mascara off her face, then turned and led him up the stairs. He stepped into the harsh light of the former dining room, where there were two leather-covered armchairs with bentwood frames. When she lowered herself into the closest, the black Lab lumbered out of the kitchen and collapsed near her, taking no note of his presence.

“You gave me a novel,” she said, “in which the long-dead lover who’s the source of all the trouble and discord is named Krisztina.”

Half the novels ever written in Central Europe probably had
a character named Krisztina, or even Kristin, but he sensed that pointing this out might interfere with whatever she planned to say next. He stepped past the dog and dropped into the chair beside hers.

“I’ve never caused trouble or discord,” she said. “But I do feel like nothing surprising can ever happen again.”

“Something just did. It surprised the living hell out of me, anyway.”

She bent over and removed one shoe, then the other, finally leaning back and closing her eyes. “I’m tired,” she said. “I feel put out and petulant. And I hate petulance more than just about anything.”

From where he sat he could see into the kitchen. On one of the counters was a bottle of red wine, about three-quarters full. A single empty glass stood beside it. “I don’t suppose you’re going to offer me a drink, by any chance?”

“No, Matt, I’m not. I hope you’ll forgive me. I appreciate the help. And I appreciate the hug.”

If she’d said “your help” or “your hug,” he might’ve reacted differently. But he felt as if his face had just been slapped. Even the fucking dog had dismissed him. He sprang out of the chair and said, “I’ll send you an invoice.”

“I didn’t mean—”

He didn’t wait to find out what she didn’t mean, knowing that much already. Instead he stormed away without his umbrella.

He thought maybe she’d drop by to apologize the next day or the one after that, and if she had he might have apologized himself, perhaps even told her he’d just experienced a humiliating nosebleed in front of his ex-wife, her new husband, his best friend and what seemed like half of Montvale, that he felt completely lost, at a dead end, and was thinking maybe he ought to buy himself a cockatiel and teach it to perch on his shoulder.
But she didn’t come by. He didn’t even see her or her husband walking the dog, though he peeked out the window numerous times over the weekend.

When Monday rolled around, he was seething. He snapped at Dushay and behaved abruptly toward several customers. Frankie kept watching out of the corner of his eye and might have offered some sage advice, or at least asked him what the fuck was the matter, if Matt hadn’t doffed his apron at the end of the day and left without helping him clean up.

He drove to the gym and sat in his car for a few minutes, trying to decide whether or not to go in, then turned back to Main Street and headed up Route 28 toward Andover. When he reached the train station, he didn’t even bother to park in the commuter lot and pay the fee, just stopped at the curb, cut his engine and jumped out.

She was standing alone on the platform, waiting for the next train with her back to him. Her shoulders were slumped, and her briefcase rested on the concrete near her right leg. There were two benches a few feet away, both unoccupied. If you were so tired, he wondered, why wouldn’t you sit down?

As if she’d detected his presence, she turned toward him. Her face gave away nothing. She looked neither surprised nor disturbed nor pleased. She didn’t ask what he was doing there, and he didn’t tell her. She just leaned down and lifted her briefcase and walked past him, and he followed her to his car.

They surveyed each other across the roof. “The drink I didn’t offer you on Friday night,” she said, “I’d like to make up for today. If you know someplace, we could have one en route.”

“What are you in the mood for?”

“Alcohol.”

The place they stopped at used to be a popular hangout among kids up and down the North Shore when Matt was in high school. Back then it was named Mister Mike’s after the guy it belonged to, and as long as you looked like you
were out of junior high you never got carded. These days it was called the Electric John, since both the men’s and women’s bathrooms boasted Incinolet toilets capable of reducing human waste to germ-free ash. The current owner was a committed environmentalist.

Inside, they took seats at a corner table underneath a banner promoting Mayflower golden ale. Only four or five others were at the bar. “The martinis are pretty good here,” he said. “At least they used to be. I haven’t been in since my divorce.”

She pulled the plastic drink card from the salt-and-pepper rack. “You used to come here with your wife?”

“Sometimes. We never lived around here—we had a place in Cambridge—but once or twice a month we drove out to see our folks, and occasionally we’d stop in for a drink. It already had a new name and owner. But it’s the space itself that used to matter.”

She looked up from the plastic card. “It still matters to you. We wouldn’t be here otherwise, would we?”

As he tried to decide how to respond, a waitress strolled over and asked what they’d like. Kristin placed the card back in the rack and ordered a martini, so he did too. After she left, neither of them was in a rush to speak again. On the TV above the bar somebody was interviewing the quarterback Brett Favre, who’d gotten in trouble for sending a woman lewd texts and videos. He kept trying to change the subject, wanting to discuss the Bears’ secondary.

“Do you ever watch football?” Matt asked, since somebody needed to say something.

“Hardly ever.”

“I don’t watch it much myself. The guy I work for stays glued to the tube every Sunday. He’s a big Pats fan, but he’s got a soft spot for Favre.”

“Who’s Favre?”

He motioned at the TV. “He plays for the Vikings now.
Used to play for the Packers. He’s never lost a game when the temperature’s below freezing. You wouldn’t expect a guy from Mississippi could adapt to cold weather.”

“My first husband was from Mississippi,” she said, “and he could adapt to anything. Or anybody.”

Once she started talking she didn’t stop, except briefly when the waitress brought the first round of drinks and then again when she brought the second. For many years now, she confessed, she’d mostly read junk. “Dan Brown or even worse.” Yet books had been her first love. They had led her to her second love, a childhood friend named Patty, and then to her next love too. She lost both of those for reasons she didn’t care to delve into. And then the books, as a matter of course, seemed to follow.

She said she initially found the novel he pressed on her boring. Beyond the conventional suspense of the unexpected guest, soon to arrive, there was nothing compelling. Then something eerie happened once she started to feel as if
Embers
had been written with her in mind. Two boys become inseparable in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They love each other, each in his own manner. They grow up, a woman comes between them, and then she, too, is lost. Portraits figure prominently in the text—those that grace the wall in the old general’s castle as well as the one that has been removed from where it hung beside all the others. “When the general’s still a boy,” she said, “and the nurse is talking with his mother, worrying what might happen if he and Konrad become estranged … well, do you remember what she says?”

He took another sip of his second martini, then shook his head. When he read a novel, he might admire it for its language, for the vividness of the characters or the setting, the urgency of its ideas, the pithiness of its dialogue. But novels no longer made him cry or lie awake at night like they used to. He hadn’t been aware of the change until now, and it made
him feel deficient. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid I don’t. It’s been a couple of years since I read it.”

“ ‘That is our human fate,’ ” Kristin said, in the same deliberate voice she’d used on the basement stairs. “ ‘One day we lose the person we love. Anyone who is unable to sustain that loss fails as a human being and does not deserve our sympathy.’ ” That very afternoon, she told Matt, she’d gone online and looked at a picture of her ex-husband. She hadn’t seen his face for sixteen years.

“You didn’t keep any photos of him?”

“No. I destroyed every one of them. And you know what’s most amazing? I chased the images out of my own mind. There were no photos of him there, either.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said. Images of Carla flooded his mind. He thought of her all day long and dreamed of her at night.

“I’m just like the old general in the novel,” Kristin said. “There’s a blank space on his wall where Krisztina’s portrait once hung. And there’s a blank space in my mind where Philip’s image used to be.”

The conversation had taken an unexpected and unwelcome turn. He assumed when she climbed into his car that having a drink was the prelude to an affair, and while he’d never conducted one himself he’d read about them and believed he understood the dynamic. Each of them would use the other for a while to satisfy some unmet need. Her husband, it went without saying, would pose a big problem, as would the proximity of their houses and the neighborhood itself. You couldn’t do anything on Essex Street without everyone else knowing about it. He foresaw a series of Updikean trysts up and down Route 28. Things would end as they always do: one day they’d just stop. There would be a few bittersweet encounters in the aisles at Shaw’s or Stop & Shop, an embarrassing moment when he had to shoot the breeze with Cal in line at Dunkin’
Donuts. That’s all these things were and all they were meant to be.

Now here was something else, an unburdening he hadn’t reckoned on, and he had no idea how to respond. It was as if he were back in the basement of the bookstore and surrounded by millions of words, all of them useless. “I thought we were going to have an affair,” he said.

The tension ever present on her face ebbed away. As the lines disappeared, they ceded space to her eyes, which seemed to grow larger as he sat there. He’d never seen her smile before, and that was all it took to make her beautiful.

“I wondered if you might not be thinking that,” she said. “But I told myself it was silly. I must be at least ten years older.”

Nabokov once noted that an optimum number of words exists for every simile, and once that number is passed the simile begins to lose its power. Discussion of a potential affair, Matt intuited, couldn’t last too long without making the affair impossible. So he reached across the table.

She didn’t jerk her hand away to avoid contact with his, just let it lie there with his on top of it. She studied them as if they were forensic evidence.

To her mind, this represented indisputable proof that if conversation, even of the most intimate nature, was all she could offer, he wouldn’t be sitting there across the table. He’d made a mess of his life, and even though he hadn’t gone to jail he acted like a newly released inmate. On the basement stairs, when she’d asked him to hold her and he put his arms around her, she knew immediately she’d made a mistake. But she couldn’t bring herself to break the embrace. Right then, she needed it that much.

Because she continued to look at his hand atop hers, she was spared having to witness the moment when the willingness to take a big risk and make a fool of himself deserted him. As far as he was concerned, his foolishness belonged in the electric toilet where it could be disinfected and turned into ash. He
removed his hand and placed it beside his empty glass. “I’m sorry, Kristin,” he said. “I used to be better than this, though I don’t expect you to believe it.”

“I used to be better than this too,” she said, then did something that she could neither explain nor justify, reaching across the table, lifting his hand and bringing it to rest once more on hers. They sat like that for a moment or two longer, then she caught the eye of the waitress and asked for the check.

In the car, as if it were a normal request, she asked him to drop her close to the train station rather than driving to her house. Before climbing out, she said, “That was the nicest hour I’ve spent in a long time, Matt.”

He said he felt the same way, but the question of whether it would happen again was never posed, much less answered.

The next day he didn’t drive to Andover. The day after that he did.

Following the town hall conversation with Sara McDonough, he walked into the deli to find Frankie and Dushay engaged in heated debate. Their dispute concerned the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case of Massachusetts inmates who’d challenged the law prohibiting incarcerated felons from voting in state elections. Unlike Frankie and the Supreme Court, Dushay was persuaded by the inmates’ argument that the law had a disproportionate impact on minority voters because more of them were in jail.