The Town: A Novel (18 page)

Doug patted the table, smiling, exhaling.

“Well,” she said. She leaned forward a moment, the overhead lamp creating a mask of shadow around her eyes. Doug leaned back reflexively, not wanting her to see any masks on him. “So why am I thirty minutes late?” She looked away for the answer, but became distracted. “I’m still shocked you waited. I mean—I’m glad. And I’m sorry. But I’m also amazed.”

“Well, really only about fifteen minutes of it was me waiting for you. The other fifteen was me pouting, knocking myself in the head.”

“Oh, no! You warned me about that.”

“It’s a problem I have.”

“You don’t—I think I tried to tell you this at the Laundromat—but you don’t strike me as the type to be so, I guess, tough on yourself.”

“I’m a fragile sort.”

She smiled at his arms, his shoulders. “Right. You bruise easy.”

“I put too much pressure on myself, I guess. Some things I take too seriously.”

“Please, you’re sitting across from the original life-or-death, agonizing-over-everything girl.”

She went off searching for that answer again as their server arrived, a shorthaired platinum blonde with one ear rimmed with copper clips. She smiled at Claire. “You made it.”

“I made it,” said Claire, pleasant, appraising.

“He looked very worried,” she said, hugging her leather order pad, nodding cheerily at Doug. “Actually, he looked pissed off.”

Doug said, “Thought I was hiding it.”

Claire said, “Was he really hitting himself in the head?”

“Close to it. My name is Drea, what can I get you?”

Claire asked for a wine recommendation and settled on something Italian called a valpolicella.

“Glass or bottle?” said Drea, looking at them both.

“Bottle,” said Doug.

“Terrific.” Drea started to leave.

“And I’ll have a soda water, lime,” said Doug.

Drea paused a second before nodding and flipping her pad back open and scribbling that in. “I’ll be right back.” And she was gone.

Claire looked at the table, wondering about his order.

“I’m driving,” Doug told her.

She looked up at him. “Okay.”

“For the rest of my life.”

Claire nodding, then gesturing after Drea. “I don’t even have to…”

“Nope,” he said, rocking gently. “It’s cool. Really.”

“Why did you get a bottle then?”

“I don’t even know,” he said, his head pounding. She was looking at him differently now. Questions popping in her mind like flashbulbs. “You were saying…”

“I was?”

“About being…”

“Right, yes. About being late.” She crossed her arms on the table and leaned on them, damning body language. “Well… the truth is, I wasn’t even going to come at all.”

“Ah. Okay.”

“I was going to blow this off. I had decided not to come. That’s why I was late.”

Doug nodded, waiting. “So what was it that changed your mind?”

She took a deep breath, held it, smiled. “I guess, in a weird way—the decision
not
to come. In other words, deciding that I didn’t
have
to come here tonight. Realizing that I don’t
have
to do
anything
… sort of relieved me of any
obligation. The longer part of the story is that… I’ve been through a lot of crap recently, and I’ll spare you all that—but my thinking’s been strange. Thinking and rethinking everything, examining my life to death, driving myself absolutely nuts. More so than usual, that is. So, fine—I’m not going to go, right? Okay, that’s decided. Then eight o’clock rolls around and I’m sitting at home, deliberately doing nothing, watching eight o’clock roll around, and I was like—‘Well, Claire, you don’t have to
not
go either.’ These are the conversations I have with myself. But it seemed like I was setting these rules, these arbitrary rules, putting up fences around my days, my nights. Following rules instead of following… the flow, you know? Doing what I want. Being me. So I decided—why the hell not? This is two people meeting for a drink, not life-or-death. Right?”

“Sure,” he said. “No.”

“People meet for drinks all the time, it’s not that mind-bending. I know I’m rambling. This happens a lot.”

“It’s good. Saves me from coming up with a bunch of clever things to say.”

“Long story short—I yanked my head out of my butt, and here I am.”

The wine arrived and she grew quiet again, circumspect, Drea opening the bottle at her hip with professional flourish, pouring a taste into Claire’s glass with that drip-saving twist of the wrist. Claire sipped and nodded that it was fine, and Doug drank some soda while Drea poured Claire a deep glass and said she’d be back for their food order.

At the end of this, in the background of Doug’s vision, two guys entered the Tap, saluted the doorman, and disappeared downstairs. Doug had made out an oversized Bruins jersey on one of them and, with a jab of anxiety, believed it to be Jem.

“Leave the iron on?” she said.

“Huh?”

“You had this look.”

“Oh.” Reading her smile. “Yeah. I think I left the milk out on the counter. Hey—are you even hungry?”

“Well, considering I didn’t plan on coming, I already ate.”

He checked the door to the stairs again, thinking, thinking. “How about getting out of here?”

“I—what?” She looked at her glass. “And going where?”

Good question. “Someplace with a view maybe. Of the city. Unless—I don’t know, your place, does it have a view?”

“I—” She stopped fast. “
My
place?”

“Whoa, no, hold up, I don’t mean—I only meant, I don’t want to be showing you the city if it’s something you see every morning when you wake up.”

“Oh.” Suspicious now. He was losing her, and fast.

“See,” he said with a glance at the surrounding tables, “I picked this place—I wasn’t ready for you to say yes, and so I went with here because it seemed like maybe the sort of place you’d like. You, who I don’t even know, right? And—
do
you even like it?”

She smiled through her confusion. “You don’t even drink.”

“Exactly. I lost my head. So what do you say?”

She looked at her glass again. “But what about… ?”

“Bring it with you.” He was pulling his cash roll from his pocket.

“Bring it?”

“I’m paying for it. Take the glass too.”

“I can’t—the glass?”

Doug unfolded his roll, discreetly but making sure she got a look at its heft, winding the thin red rubber band around his fingers and stripping a century off the top, standing it in front of the vase, Franklin out, then snapping the band back around the roll and tucking it away.

“Just smile at the doorman,” he said, lifting the bottle as she stood. “I guarantee you, he won’t see a thing.”

T
HEY MADE SMALL TALK
going up the hill, walking slow, she with her arms folded, the wineglass in one hand. Their date had spilled out into the Town at large, potential complications on every block. An undercurrent of self-interrogation went on like radio chatter inside his head.
What the fuck are you doing?
And his answer became a mantra:
Just one date. Just one date.

“So what about you?” she asked. “You’ve lived here—”

“All my life, yeah. You, before this?”

“I’ve lived all over the city, since college. Grew up in Canton.”

“Canton. That’s Blue Hills, right? There’s a rink there, off the highway. Skated there a few times.”

“Right, Ponkapoag, I think.”

“So, the suburbs, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. The suburbs.”

Doug plucked an overturned recycling bin out of the street, returned it to a doorway. Working hard to be smooth. “What do you do for a job?”

“I’m in banking,” she said. Then: “Wow.”

“What?” Doug looked around for
wow
.

“No, just that phrase. ‘I’m in banking.’ Not sure if that was meant to impress you or bore you. I manage a BayBanks branch. It’s a lot like running a convenience store, except I move money instead of calling cards and snacks. You?”

“What do I do? Well, that depends. We still trying to impress each other?”

“Sure, go for it.”

“I’m a sky-maker.”

“Wow,” she said again. “You win.”

“I’m in demolition. Blasting rock, bringing down buildings.
Making sky,
that’s from when you level a big building, opening up views. Suddenly you’ve made some sky.”

“I like it,” she decided. “Do you do those old hotels and stadiums they always show on TV, that detonate inward into their own pile of rubble?”

“No, I’m more hands-on. Basically, if you’ve seen
The Flintstones,
that’s me. When the whistle blows, I’m surfing down the neck of a brontosaurus and outta there.”

They crested on Bunker Hill Street, having climbed from about nine to almost eleven on the ticking Charlestown clock. He led her across the gas-lit thoroughfare to the mouth of Pearl Street, the outline of a plan starting to form.

Any thoughts he had of changing his clothes were dashed with one glance at Jem’s mother’s demo-worthy house halfway down the plunging street. The Flamer, Jem’s banged-up Trans Am, blue on blue with blue flames detailed on the sides and hood, was parked there like a flare in the road warning Doug away.

His own Caprice Classic was three cars down. “Just a sec,” said Doug, pulling out his keys, opening the driver’s-side door.

She stayed back on the curb, looking at the dingy white four-door and its fading blue, soft-top roof. “Is this your car?”

“Oh, no,” he said, reaching under the velour passenger seat, rocking the musky orange Hooters deodorizer dangling from the cigarette lighter. “I loaned this jerk I know some CDs.” He felt around the blue carpeting for them, then straightened, waving two jewel cases, too fast for her to read them.

He walked her back across Bunker, hiking up three blocks west under the gas lamps to the Heights, stopping before St. Frank’s steeple at the top of the hill. “Here we are.”

It was a clean brownstone triple with bowfront windows and blooming flower boxes painted fireball red. The double doors were black with buffed brass knockers, handles, and kickplates. Doug stepped inside the faux-marble entrance, nudging aside a couple of FedEx boxes with his new shoes.

“You live here?” she said, cautious, remaining on the sidewalk.

“No way.” He reached up, feeling along the top of the frame of the interior door. “No, friend of mine manages it.” He came down with the key, showed it to her, turned it in the door. “We’re just gonna use the stairs to get up top. What do you say?”

After a glance of concern up and down the sidewalk, she followed him inside.

The roof was rubber-sealed and lumpy, hedged on all four sides by two-foot brick crenellations. An abandoned wire-and-wood pigeon coop did not obstruct their postcard view of the city, Boston laid out against a silk screen of blue-black, from the financial towers to the mirrored Hancock to the dominant Prudential building, with the busy interstate a twinkling ribbon wrapping it all.

Claire stood at the southern edge, the city side, looking down at the rest of the Town like a woman on a high bridge, the now empty glass in her hand. “Wow.”

“That is the word of the night,” said Doug. He unfolded two lawn chairs from inside the coop, their blue-and-white nylon webbing frayed, the hollow aluminum frames predating cup holders. “Drops off pretty good down the hill, don’t it.”

The rooftops on either side were graded steps climbing to the sky, many with cedar decks, patio furniture, grills. Old, thorny TV antennas mixed with satellite dishes turned like hopeful faces to the southwest. To the left, looking east above Flagship Wharf in the navy yard, jet lights slid out of the sky, stars on a string. Other planes circled overhead in defined holding patterns, a swirling constellation.

The sounds of the Town rose to them as she walked back to the chair next to the wine bottle, her free hand in her pocket. “This sky—is it one of yours?”

Doug took a careful look around. “Yep, it’s mine.”

“I especially like what you did with these stars over here.”

“We get those imported. Hey—ever ordered anything off TV? You know, late night, infomercials?”

“No. But if I did, it would be a Flowbee.”

Doug held up the two CDs. “
AM Gold
. Time-Life stuff, you know, try it for thirty days, we’ll send another every four to six weeks, you can cancel at any time?” The boom box, an old Sanyo missing its cassette drawer, was bikechained to the doorpost of the coop. Doug dropped in the first CD, let it spin.

“Oh my,” she said. It was the Carpenters.

“You gotta give it a little time to work on you. This is a big step for me.”

“What is, coming out of the closet as a Carpenters fan?”

“Let me correct you right there. Definitely not a Carpenters
fan
. This is about the total effect of the music, the predisco seventies. I don’t sanction every single track, and some of them are pretty bad. ‘Muskrat Love’ is on here somewhere. What I like is the radio station aspect of it, like receiving a signal timedelayed twenty years.”

She took the jewel case from him and sat down to look it over. “Wow,” she said, amused. “My mom used to have these songs on all day.”

“Sure, WHDH, right?” He sat down a respectable three feet away from her, both of them facing the city like it was the ocean.

“Every morning, getting ready for school.”

“Jess Cain.”

“
Yes.
Wow.” The uniting power of nostalgia. “And Officer Bill in the traffic copter.”

Doug’s mother had kept the kitchen radio going day and night. It was one of his clearest memories of her. But sharing this fact with Claire would have invited other questions, and his past was a minefield. He had to be careful not to blow himself up here.

She handed him back the CD case. “You come up here often?”

“No. Almost never.”

“This isn’t where you take all your dates?”

“In fact, I should admit it now, what I said downstairs was sort of a fib. I don’t actually know who manages this building. I just know where the key is.”

“Oh.” She thought about that, looking out at the city winking back at her.