The Realm of Last Chances (7 page)

She told him her administrative assistant at North Shore State had, and while she now understood she’d gone out of her way by taking the Haverhill Line and then complicated matters by getting on the wrong bus, she hadn’t liked the tone of the exchange.

He laughed and lowered his sunglasses. “In New England it helps to be tone-deaf. People here tend to speak their minds.”

“Speaking your mind’s just fine. Since I’m going to be her boss, though, I thought more politeness was called for. Especially since I work in administration, which is pretty serious. But who knows, maybe I got a little touchy-feely during my years in California.”

He asked where she was originally from, so she told him, and then he wanted to know how she’d become an administrator. She fielded that question all the time and usually responded with platitudes about wanting to help faculty members maximize themselves, but today she didn’t feel like fudging the truth. “I wasn’t much of a teacher,” she said, “and I’d lost interest in what I was doing. So when something up the food chain opened up, I applied. And it turned out I was good at it.”

“It’s great to be good at something,” he said, his tone suggesting he might be the rare exception who was good at nothing. But since he’d told her not to pay too much attention to tone, she went ahead and asked, “What do you excel at?”

“That’s a tough one. But all things considered? I’d have to say pastrami on rye.”

He was posturing, and nothing put her off quite as much as a man who could fluently marshal a line. Her first husband
had been able to, and he’d done it so well, for so long, that she couldn’t distinguish between a spiel and the truth. He wrote about the poetry of high modernism—his first book was
T. S. Eliot and the Shifting Persona
—so perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised when he informed her that the trip he’d taken to Ann Arbor was for a job interview, not a conference, or that he’d just accepted a position there, or that his thesis advisee, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Visalia dairy farmer, would be going with him in the fall. The primary attraction to Cal, if she wanted to be honest, was that he initially appeared incapable of delivering any lines at all. When asked why he alone, of the many musicians who gathered at the crossroads grocery, never tried to sing, he smiled shyly and said he couldn’t remember lyrics. It took her a few years to discover that while he might be no good with poetry, even he could tell a story.

“You asked me two serious questions,” she told Matt, “and I gave you two serious answers. I asked you one, and you gave me nothing.”

They were out of Andover now. On this stretch Route 28 had only two lanes, and they’d fallen in behind a large truck with the Salvation Army logo on its rear door and were doing all of thirty miles an hour. The train might have been faster and less taxing.

“Well,” he replied, “it’s complicated.”

“Isn’t that what people put under ‘Relationship Status’ on Facebook when they’re seeing somebody who’s seeing somebody else?”

“Maybe. I don’t know the first thing about Facebook.”

“I don’t either. But I live in the world in the year 2010, and I have some idea of what other people are up to.”

“I used to be good at books.”

“Reading them? Writing them? Stealing them?”

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I never stole a book in my life. You don’t steal what you love.”

Rather than take issue with an assertion she considered suspect, she said, “So what did you
do
with books?”

“I bought them.”

“For yourself?”

“No, for the Harvard Book Emporium. For years I ordered every work of fiction that came through the door.”

Ahead of them, a traffic light was just turning red. Knowing he’d shoot right through it, she braced herself against the dash, and he didn’t disappoint her. “And?”

“And then the complications started. I lost my job.”

“I lost mine, too. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’ll be damned. Really? What did
you
do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” she said. “You might not have heard, but the country’s going through a recession? As always, California got ahead of the curve. We had cutbacks. My position was combined with someone else’s.” She should’ve held her tongue then, and might have if she hadn’t started her day by climbing aboard a bus to Lynn that sat in a spot marked
BRADBURY
. And ever since, people had been acting as if the signs and signals that were supposed to govern behavior had no meaning. “So what,” she asked, “did you do?”

He didn’t answer right away, and she knew he was trying to decide whether to lie, tell the truth or change the subject.

He finally said, “I didn’t have to work the cash registers, but I made a point of doing it for an hour or so every day. The staff loved it. You’ve got a very leftist workforce there, and for me to do something as lowly as ringing up sales … well, that created a kind of egalitarian atmosphere.

“What I’d do once or twice a week was engage somebody in a lot of book chat while checking them out—usually, customers who were getting on in years, very often women, and
only when they were buying a number of big hardcovers—and then I’d immediately hit the
RETURNS
button and zero out the entire sale. Toward the end of the day, I’d take exactly that sum in cash.

“I eventually made the mistake of canceling out a sale on the same customer twice. She was one of those Cambridge types we referred to as ‘the wives of dead professors.’ In her seventies, reasonably well off, not too much to do anymore except read. When she got interested in something, she’d research the topic and then come in with a list of titles. When she decided to bone up on LBJ, she wanted all the Caro books, Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Dallek stuff,
Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, The Best and the Brightest
—even Lady Bird’s
White House Diary
, which to my surprise we had with the used books in the basement. We’d follow her around with two or three hand baskets. She gave us a pretty good workout.

“When she went in to see the manager, she told him that the first time it happened, she assumed it was a mistake. Said I was the nicest, most helpful person she’d come across in ages, which was why she always asked for me. Most people never look at a receipt as long as the total sounds right, but she wasn’t most people. The second time, I didn’t even remember having done it before—close to three years had passed—but she never threw away sales slips and she still had the old one and handed both of them over to my boss.

“When they got through auditing my receipts, it was stunning how much I’d stolen. I had no idea. I could’ve gone to prison, but my boss was a softhearted guy, and he let my mom pay him back and didn’t press charges.”

He quit talking, which she took as indication that the time had come to move beyond narrative into analysis and perhaps even criticism. “Why did you do it?” she asked.

“For the most predictable of reasons. I was snorting a ton of
coke, and that’s not cheap. Plus, a lot of writers come through that store, including some huge names, and quite a few of them were willing to hang out late and get blasted. I tried too hard to impress them. I wanted to be what they were.”

“To be a writer?”

“Sure. Didn’t you?”

“No. Never.”

He shook his head as if he didn’t believe her. “I thought almost everybody doing a Ph.D. in literature wanted to be one, that you all had two or three novels or a stack of poems secreted away in your desks.”

“I don’t have anything like that in my desk.”

“Amazing,” he said. “No secrets.”

“I didn’t say I don’t have
secrets
,” she said, then immediately regretted it, since this was an invitation for him to ask what they were.

It surprised her when he didn’t, and even more so that she felt offended by his failure to ask, as if he considered it a given that her secrets, whatever they might be, were less worthy of discussion than his own.

When Matt stopped in front of her house, he saw her husband sitting in a lawn chair on the patio, having a drink while the black Lab snoozed at his feet. A charcoal grill stood nearby, smoke rising from the grate.

“Here,” she said, “let me introduce you to Cal.”

He protested that they could do it some other time, since she’d had a long day and her husband was enjoying himself.

“Don’t be silly. Come on, we’re neighbors.”

So he climbed out of the car, and they started across the yard. At first the other man just stared at them, his long jaw slackening into an expression of puzzlement. As they came closer, he set the drink on the ground—straight whiskey, it
looked like—and unfolded himself from his chair, all his angles straightening simultaneously. He was even taller than Matt had thought. At least six four, if not more. “Hi, there,” he said.

“Cal, this is our new neighbor. Matt Drinnan. He happened to be in Andover, and when he saw me marching glumly toward the train station, he was kind enough to offer me a ride.” She pointed across the street. “He lives up there, in the blue Queen Anne.”

As Matt’s hand was enveloped by one twice as large as his own, Cal sighed. “Oh, thank God.”

“For what?” she said.

Before offering Matt a drink and demanding that he stay for dinner, Cal said, “When I saw you get out of someone else’s car, my first thought was that you’d had a wreck. Then I realized you didn’t drive to work.”

Though each of them, in the months ahead, would recall the exact remark differently, all three noted that his initial reaction, upon seeing them together, was to assume disaster had struck.

in the morning,
the old general spent a considerable amount of time in the wine cellars with his winegrower inspecting two casks of wine that had begun to ferment. He had gone there at first light, and it was past eleven o’clock before he had finished drawing off the wine and returned home. Between the columns of the veranda, which exuded a musty smell from its damp flagstones, his gamekeeper was standing waiting for him, holding a letter
.

“What do you want?” the General demanded brusquely, pushing back his broad-brimmed straw hat to reveal a flushed face. For years now, he had neither opened nor read a single letter. The mail went to the estate manager’s office, to be sorted and dealt with by one of the stewards
.

She stuck her finger in the book and closed it, unable at the moment to progress beyond the first page. The other night, after Cal grilled steaks and they sat outside with their neighbor and consumed two bottles of Cabernet, Matt had insisted they walk over to his place so he could loan her his copy of the best novel he’d read in the last two or three years. He hadn’t invited them inside, just let them wait on the porch while he pulled it off the shelf. When he mentioned the book at dinner, she hadn’t recognized the author’s name—Sándor Márai—but kept that to herself because she could tell Matt thought surely she would’ve known his work. Later, this failure to admit her ignorance troubled her and was the main reason
Embers
had lain untouched on her bedside table until this morning. She’d been spending her daily commute familiarizing herself with work-related documents like the faculty handbook, which listed the school’s policies on tenure, promotion, professional leaves and sexual harassment.

Holding the novel in her lap, she looked out the window at the houses the train was passing, each right next to the other, and even at this relatively low speed they all blurred together. Perhaps because she was finally back on the East Coast after so many years, she’d been thinking a lot lately about the house she grew up in, the neighborhood where it stood, her mother and father and the people who lived next door.

At one time she’d felt as much at home in the Connultys’ house as her own, and the couple’s daughter had been her best friend. Her initial bond with Patty was their mutual fondness for something almost everyone else in her circle would have deemed disgusting. They became aware of it a couple of weeks after the Connultys moved in. Until then, they’d studied each other warily through the line of mountain laurel that formed a porous barrier between their backyards. They were ten or eleven at the time and, since it was summer, hadn’t yet met in school. But Mrs. Connulty came by one morning and invited them all to dinner, and though Kristin begged her parents to let her stay home since it was Thursday and her favorite
Bewitched
episode would rerun that night, they told her she needed to make friends with the girl next door. “Just imagine,” her mother said, “how you’d feel if you didn’t know a soul in the world.” She said the family had moved from Allentown and that Mr. Connulty was the new manager of the Pennsylvania Power & Light plant at Shamokin Dam.

Afterward, Kristin couldn’t remember what they’d eaten for dinner, though Patty always maintained they had middle-of-the-road fare: roast beef with mashed potatoes, stewed carrots, Brussels sprouts. Dessert, she said, was strawberry shortcake. While the adults sat in the spacious living room and enjoyed an after-dinner drink, the girls were told to go upstairs. A tall, large-boned woman with thick auburn-colored hair, a soft voice and an unusual accent, Mrs. Connulty said, “On your way, look in the pantry. You might find you some treats.”

The kitchen closet was the kind you walked into, big enough for two girls their age to stand side by side. “Her idea of a treat,” Patty said, “might seem a little bit weird.” She’d barely spoken all night, and Kristin had already decided that she didn’t want to be her friend. Unlike most people, whose expressions were constantly changing, whether happy or sad, puzzled or mad, Patty’s expression remained fixed, as if she’d been captured by a photographer in a moment of bored composure—at church, say, or the funeral of a distant relative.

“What’s so weird about her idea of a treat?” Kristin asked.

The other girl flicked on a light. The shelves were stocked as neatly as those at Food Giant, and they were almost as full. Most of what she saw was pretty basic: cans of Le Sueur green peas, boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese.