***
Mike had told me he and Melanie were trying to get pregnant, and several nights in a row I heard them going at it from my room. Mostly I heard her. I’d be stretched out on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling, and suddenly I’d hear a noise and realize it was Melanie. It would get louder and then turn into these sharp, breathless chirps. I’d stay right where I was, frozen. It made me jealous, of course, but I also felt like I was doing something wrong, like I should’ve snuck outside and waited out there until they were done. The next afternoon I’d feel awkward when it was Melanie and I alone, chit-chatting while I cooked, but then Mike would come home and we’d all sit and chew our fork-tender meat and Melanie would have a glass of wine and there’d be earnest, decade-old music playing and all would be normal enough again.
The routine became that I would go out to the porch with Mike after dinner and hang out with him while he smoked, usually with gin drinks, talking sometimes about the pitiful baseball team but mostly about the assholes Mike dealt with every day. Mike hated his boss. He hated his clients. Hearing about all these lawyers and the slimy companies they defended, it was easy for me to believe in that good-guy capital I’d built up.
One evening, Mike clinked his ice cubes around and poured more gin. Then he looked me in the eye and said he envied me. His tie was loose, his eyes glassy. Melanie had gone to bed.
“Your life doesn’t boss you around every second,” he said. “Every once in a while you get to choose your next action. I don’t remember what that’s like.”
“I choose my actions, but I usually don’t choose them well,” I told him.
“If I got turned loose on a Monday morning I’d probably wander around bashing into tree trunks, then drown in someone’s pool. I’m a red-tape artist, is what I am. I do the devil’s paperwork.”
I looked upward and the sky was an empty screen. If Mike wanted a bunch of sympathy from me, that didn’t strike me as fair. “What about coaching that football team?” I said.
“That’s for the firm. We have to do shit in the community.” He was chewing a mouthful of ice. “Everybody’s claiming little pieces of me. You’re like, a self. I know you think you’re on hard times, but at least you’re still whole.”
My impulse was to run myself down, to convince him not to envy me, but I resisted it. Everybody had a self. Some people’s selves had gainful employment and understanding wives from well-off families.
“I don’t want to have a kid,” he said. “That’s why it’s not working. My sperm have low morale.”
“Still nothing?”
“I’ll talk myself into it eventually. I’ll talk myself into wanting a child, just like I talked myself into going to law school.”
He lowered his drink and then raised it back up and finished the thing. I didn’t know where his energy came from, if he was so unhappy.
“You’re free, man,” he said. “You could buy a crappy old boat and sail to Mexico if you wanted. You could hop in your truck and drive to Alaska.”
I laughed, and even to my ears it sounded caustic.
“Fuck it,” he said. He was out of cigarettes. He flipped the empty box off in the bushes and pocketed his lighter. “I need to start rolling my own is what I need to do.”
He slipped his tie off, folded it neatly, and lifted the lid of his monumental barbecue grill. He rested the tie across the grates, the apple-green silk lustrous even against the polished heating elements. Then he brought the lid back down, grinning bleakly.
The next afternoon I hung around the restaurant while the guy from the air-conditioning company installed the new unit and inspected the ductwork and put in new filters. I decided to skip dinner at the house in favor of sitting in the cab of my truck with the radio turned down low, a six-pack of tallboys for company. I was down at the beach, waiting for people to get stuck again. Well past midnight, I watched a Japanese pickup flounder and then sink itself to the wheel wells — the tiny kind of truck they don’t even make anymore. I went and said hello and hooked them to the hitch. A fresh Air Force cadet and his gal. They were so drunk, I felt I hadn’t had a drop. The boy kept talking about his uncle, saying he was going to do precisely as his uncle had told him, saying his uncle had instructed him to take this girl out on a date and get to second base. The girl cackled. The boy said his uncle had told him to send the wine back at the restaurant and damn if he hadn’t done it. He’d had one sip and sent it right back.
The next time the sharks struck, it was a little girl. She lost a finger right in the middle of the morning. I heard the ambulance siren from the restaurant and walked down and got the story third-hand from an old jogger. The girl had been told to stay out of the water, to stay where it was dry and build sand castles while her aunt tanned and trolled a romance novel, but the wind flung the girl’s pail into the water’s-edge foam and she went after it. She didn’t know anything had happened, they said — it was a clean, almost surgical amputation — until she sat back down at her sand castle and saw blood running into the moat.
The next time I took the 4x4 down onto the beach, Mike came along. I found my accustomed spot on a shallow rise just north of the pier and shut off the engine and the headlights. Mike stripped down to his undershirt, shucked off his shoes and socks. He opened the glove box and tossed in his phone. “We’ll leave the choke collar in here a little while,” he said. I usually sat in the cab facing the pier, but Mike didn’t want to be cooped up, so we got out and I let the tailgate down. No tallboys tonight. Mike had hauled out gin and a bottle of tonic and a thermos full of ice cubes. He even had slices of lime in a plastic baggie and some ginger cookies a client had sent to his office. The breeze kept kicking up, blowing sand on our shins. There was a volleyball court not far up the beach, and now and then we heard the dull thud of a spike.
“What now?” Mike said.
“Now we wait,” I told him. “If we pull one out, that’s a good night. If we get two, that’s a great night. Three, historic.”
“We’ll probably get half a dozen,” he said. “I’m something of a good-luck charm.”
There was no moon yet. A jet passed overhead, trailing its roar behind it. We finished the first round of drinks and made another, drinking fast because of the heat. A bunch of people in matching red T-shirts hurried past, whispering urgently, participants in a scavenger hunt or some other wholesome mischief. Mike and I started talking about people we used to know in college, the successes and catastrophes. A guy we used to hang around with was running for Congress. Another was a professor at a school in Singapore. Another had his own show on the Weather Channel. A couple guys we knew had overdosed on drugs, and one had drowned in a river in Alaska.
Mike ate the last cookie. He crumpled the box and tossed it behind him, into the bed of the truck. “I’m not going to ask anything about Dana,” he said. “If you’re not upset about her, I’m glad. If you are upset still, talking to me isn’t going to help. I just want to let you know, for whenever you want to take me up on it, that I’m acquainted with any number of legal secretaries who are having a hard time finding a decent guy. I’m not a matchmaker, but just so you know. My resources are at your disposal.”
“So you’ll tell them I’m a decent guy?”
“Well, I guess I have no idea about that. It’s always the ones like you that turn out to be serial killers.”
“Killing people isn’t for me,” I said. “I don’t like secrets.”