The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (25 page)

Then it was August 26, 1983. I’d spent the morning haying with Lolly, and had planned to spend the afternoon over at school, getting my classroom ready for opening day. But while Lolly, Hennie, and I were eating lunch, the doorbell rang. The divorce papers had arrived from Patti’s lawyer. I never made it over to school. By mid-afternoon, I was still lying upstairs on my bed with that unopened package of legal papers sitting on my stomach. Thinking: Well, she was right. We’d gotten married too early and grown in different directions. I
was
aloof. I
was
boring. And in the middle of my pity party, Lolly called up the stairwell. “Caelum? Phone!”

It was Enid Markey, a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. Said she usually only read books that were represented by agents, but that one of their summer interns had been assigned the slush pile and had discovered
The Absent Boy.
The manuscript had made its way from office to office and had, the day before, landed on her desk.

“What’s the slush pile?” I said. It was pretty much what I thought.

Enid said she’d read through the night, intrigued by the first chapter, enthralled by what came after. That was the word she used: enthralled.
Introducing readers to a talented new writer was the part of her job she most enjoyed, she said. The book’s flaws were entirely fixable. Simon & Schuster would be delighted to publish
The Absent Boy.
“I’m assigning you to a wonderful young associate editor, Francesca LaBarre. Arrived last year, summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr. She’s brilliant!”

And she was. Beautiful, too. Not fat, but fleshy. Different from Patti in every other way, too: self-assured, temperamental, sexy. She signaled me that very first meeting, up there in her cramped little office on the twelfth floor. Pulled my chair next to hers so that we could go through the text together, and while she was making her points, asking her questions, our shoulders kept colliding. I’d go to turn a page, and she’d stop me. Put her hand on top of mine, her fingertips resting in the spaces between my knuckles. I mean, in terms of pheromones, they were going off like the Fourth of July. After our second meeting, she took me to lunch at a place just down the street from her apartment. “You want to come up?” she asked…. You always hear how, what men want is release and what women want is intimacy. Not Francesca. She preferred coming to cuddling. Made love the way she tackled text and the way she ate: with an urgent and ravenous appetite.

God, that one time? I get off the train at Grand Central, get over to her place. She buzzes me up, and I’m barely in the door before we’re going at it. Her, with her skirt hiked up and her shoulder blades banging against the wall and me, with my pants down at my ankles and my sports jacket still on—the one I wore teaching that day—thrusting into her, and into her, and into her….

I popped a boner thinking about it.

And God, New York, man: that was part of it, too. Those art house movies she liked, the galleries and used bookstores. That little Italian restaurant on Mulberry Street with the big olive jars in the windows, and that same waiter we always had. What was his name? … Manhattan was like the antidote for Three Rivers, Francesca the antidote to
Patti, my high school sweetheart, my prim, inhibited Irish-Catholic wife who used to have to undress in the dark. Who’d had her first orgasm maybe two, three years into our marriage. When I was writing my novel, I’d hand Patti a new chapter to read, and she’d read it and hand it back to me, nervously. “It’s good,” she’d say.

“That’s it? It’s good.”

“I work in a
bank,
Caelum. What do you
want
me to say?”

As opposed to Francesca, who understood the nuances of my story better than I did. Who could finesse a sentence, change a verb, and make a whole paragraph sing. She was as brilliant an editor as Enid had promised. Helped me make a much better book. And Jesus, the fringe benefits….

It got so we could synchronize it. Get there together. She was the only one of the three of them that I could do that with. I told Alphonse Buzzi about it, and he said, “Oh, man, you gotta
marry
that.” And I had. Met her the first of September, married her the first of February.

“Married?
Already?”
Lolly shouted into the phone. “Good God almighty, you work quick! You moving to New York, or is she moving here?”

“Neither one for now,” I said.

Then Enid gets uterine cancer and joins the fucking Hemlock Society. Francesca gets a better offer at Random House. The new regime sweeps in, cancels my contract. “It’s a fine book in many ways, Mr. Quirk,” the new senior editor tells me. “It’s just not a home run.”

I’m sitting across from her, thinking I wish I could say it. Then I
do
say it. “You know, you got a pretty heavy mustache for a woman.”

Francesca tried selling
The Absent Boy
at Random House, although how
hard
she tried I never really knew. She kept telling me I needed an agent, so I got an agent. The first time we ate lunch together, Lon said my writing read like a hybrid of poetry and prose, and that the ending of the novel, jaded as he was, had made him cry. His plan was to get two houses interested, have them fight it out in an auction
situation. “The whores out in Hollywood are going to give you
blow jobs
to get ahold of this story.” Then this Kevin Costner movie comes out, and it’s about the abduction of a little boy. Goes belly-up at the box office. By the end of the second year, Lon wasn’t even returning my phone calls.

“Take a leave of absence from teaching and start something new,” Francesca advised. “Move in with me.” Instead, I carried my galleys up to Lolly’s attic and took a second job, teaching a lit course over at Oceanside Community College. Going into New York every weekend got old. Too many student papers to get through, too little of Francesca’s attention when I did take the train down. And God forbid
she
should get on one. Get herself up to Connecticut on a Friday night and be with her husband…. Hey, it was a mismatch from the beginning. The foreign service diplomat’s daughter and the son of a drunk. The weekend marriage. Wasn’t going to work. She took her appetites elsewhere and claimed
I
was the problem….
Emotional castrato:
she couldn’t just insult me. Had to give it that finishing-school twist. Had to take her house key and scratch it onto my fucking computer monitor…. But it was good before it got bad.
Great
at the beginning. Weed and waterbed sex, that floor-to-ceiling mirror propped in the corner of her bedroom wall so we could watch ourselves….

I took another sip of wine. Took matters into my own hand. Hey, why not? Expedient. Uncomplicated. Might even help me get some sleep. It wasn’t like I could go upstairs and ask
her
for it. Not then, and probably not for quite a while. It was like she was radioactive or something. Like she was that scared little eleven-year-old over at her father’s house….

So I jacked a little faster, conjuring Francesca’s breasts—the heft of them in my hands, those areolas dark as wine. I stroked to the rise and fall of her waterbed. Made my finger do that little flicking thing she’d do with her tongue. Thought about how she’d laugh as I came. Taste it. Welcome it. With my free hand, I groped for something, anything. Grabbed the Cheez-It box and let go in that….

I cleared my throat, tucked myself back inside my boxers. What was that old Joni Mitchell lyric?”After the rush, when you come back down….” Upstairs, the toilet flushed. Selfish prick, I thought. Absent Boy….

Gualtiero : that was that waiter’s name.

I sure as hell hoped she wasn’t up there taking more Tylenol. I had to get her to a doctor. Get her some
real
sleeping pills, rather than screwing around with over-the-counter shit. I’d call Monday morning, get her an appointment. Maybe if she could start sleeping through the night again, I could, too. Shit, man, half of Arapahoe County must be taking sleeping pills.

I killed the last of the wine. Reclined my chair the rest of the way. The Lakers-Celtics game went into double overtime….

I woke up at dawn. The dogs were sniffing my feet. The TV was still on: bass fishing now. I righted the recliner, got up. Stepped on the Cheez-It box. Collapsed and folded it as tight as it would go, then stuffed it into the garbage. With my entourage, I stumbled barefoot to the backdoor. The dogs rushed out, the cold air rushed in. If I wanted to find out who won that game, I’d have to do a freakin’ Internet search. I had a bitch of a headache.

“
FORBID
YOU
?”
I SAID
. “
MAUREEN
, when have I ever
forbidden
you from doing anything? I’m just making the point that, when we went over to Clement Park Wednesday night, the crowd freaked you out. And the thing at the church. You said being in that packed room made you nervous. Made your heart race.”

“I was preoccupied about Velvet,” she said. “Now I’ll be able to focus.”

“This crowd’s going to be
a hundred
times bigger. That’s all I’m saying. But
forbid
you? Come on, Mo. Get real.”

She insisted she could handle it. She’d had a four-hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep, she said, and was feeling better. More in control.
She’d take
comfort
in the anonymity of a big crowd. Nobody would know where she’d been during the shootings. What she’d seen and heard. This wouldn’t be anything like that church meeting, where she’d been afraid they were going to call on her and make her speak.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll give it a try.”

We left the house an hour before the program was scheduled to start, but they’d blocked off several of the streets and I had to park almost a mile away from Bowles Crossing, where the service was. The rain began when we were halfway there. I had Maureen get under the awning of a coffee shop. “Go inside and get a coffee if you get cold,” I said. I jogged back to the car, got my big umbrella, and made it back in under fifteen minutes.

She wasn’t out there. Wasn’t inside either. I ran down to the cross street. No sign of her. With my heart pounding, I went back inside the coffee shop. Approached the skinny, aproned guy behind the counter. “You see a woman come in here? Jean jacket and a turquoise skirt? Reddish-brown hair?”

“She’s in the back with Andrea. She came in here and she was like whimpering or something. And then she comes behind the counter, starts opening the cabinet doors like she’s looking for something. And we’re like, ‘What’s the matter, lady? What’s wrong with you?‘”

She was seated at a tiny table in a room jam-packed with boxes. There was a steaming, oversized cup of coffee on the table. A punk-rock-looking woman, early twenties, was holding Mo’s hand, stroking it.

“Hey?” I said.

Mo looked up at me. Didn’t smile.

“We didn’t know whether to call nine-one-one or not,” the woman said.

“No, we’re good,” I said. “Thanks for your concern. What do we owe you for the coffee?”

She shook her head. Repositioned herself in the doorway. “Ma’am,
do you want to go with this gentleman? Or would you rather stay here and have us call someone?”

“Hey, I’m her
husband”
I said.

She looked me in the eye, nostrils flaring. “I volunteer at a women’s shelter. I know a lot about husbands.”

We stood there, glaring at each other. “Not that it’s any of your business,” I said. “But this isn’t about me. It’s about Columbine High School.”

“Oh,” she said. She dropped her defensive stance and stood aside.

We walked out front, ignoring the stares as best we could. Outside, I started her in the direction of our car. “No!” she said, pulling away. She’d panicked, but she was okay now. She was going to the memorial service. “Where
were
you?” she demanded.

“Maureen, you know where I was. I went to get the umbrella. I got back here as fast as I could.”

A few hundred silent steps later, she told me what had happened. Two teenage boys—one tall, the other short—had sauntered past the coffee shop, laughing and talking loudly. “I got confused,” she said. “I thought they were alive again. I thought I was back in the library.”

“Oh, Mo,” I said. “Oh, Jesus, Mo.”

HUDDLED UNDER UMBRELLAS AND JACKET
hoods, the bereaved and the curious filled the three-acre parking lot. The overflow crowd was out in the street, on the rooftops of nearby stores and restaurants. Seventy thousand, the paper said the next day—twice what they’d expected. As Maureen and I approached the periphery, music was playing—guitars, undecipherable lyrics. Silver and blue balloons, hundreds of them, lifted into the drizzly sky.

We were way the hell away from the stage, but they’d set up big video screens. Denver’s archbishop assured us that love was stronger than death. The rabbi from Beth Shalom told us our grief should inspire
us to greater awareness of the humanity in all. All? I wondered. Even those two?

As the governor read the names of the victims, a fluttering white dove was released for each. Eric’s and Dylan’s names were omitted. No doves for them. Watching one of those birds soar on the big screen sent me back to Three Rivers—to that stained glass window at St. Anthony’s. The Holy Trinity, the three-in-one: I’d stare at them every Sunday when I was a kid, trying to figure it out. God the Father and God the Son I could understand, no problem. But God the Holy Ghost? A white bird with a halo? My friend Jimmy Jacobson had a bird—a cockatiel—and it’d crap all over the bottom of its cage. Latch on to your finger with its toenail beak, and it would
hurt.
“Is it a bird or is it a ghost?” I’d ask my mother.

“God is a mystery,” she’d say. As if
that
was a satisfactory answer.

Amy Grant sang a Christian song. Billy Graham’s son said a prayer. Al Gore approached the podium, looking somber and stately. “What say we into the open muzzle of this tragedy, cocked and aimed at our hearts?” he asked. The answer to that question shaped the rest of his remarks, but I can’t remember what he said.

Jack Eams, a coach and assistant principal, was one of the last speakers to be introduced. He’d played pro football for a few seasons back in the sixties—the Vikings, if I remembered right. A silver-haired bulldog in a tan suit, he approached the podium, gripped it on either side, and leaned into the mic. “Raise your hand if you go to Columbine High,” he said. He scanned the crowd, nodding at the waving hands. “I want to talk to
you
kids specifically, okay? Remind you that what happened last Tuesday does not define who we are, okay?” His delivery seemed out of sync with the rest of the service—more half-time pep talk than tribute. “Because Columbine’s not about hatred, okay? Columbine’s about love. Columbine
is
love. And I want you to repeat those words after me, and I want everyone else here today to say them along with you. Okay? You ready? Columbine is love.”