Then the women — how did this happen? — lifted their arms and began to swirl, swaying and bending from the waist. Dan Bolduke shambled around for a while like a good-natured oaf before he took up his wife and kissed her on the lips. When one by one the other women passed through my arms, I knew the feel of most of them, the moistness and density of their flesh. My patients, my neighbors: I am too old a man to have women for friends. And I thought it was sad that there were not more men for them to dance with, that they had no choice but to dance with each other, the way they did when they were schoolgirls.
And so it went through two dozen songs, an hour or more, until finally I boxed myself in a corner with Yvonne, whom I did not twirl under my arm but held firm against my chest in a proper two-step. Something Gershwin, maybe “Long Ago and Far Away”— just before the final chorus I took our outstretched hands and squeezed and pressed hers to my lips. I suppose the liquor made me giddy; I remember whispering a brief ode into her knuckles. “You are lovely inside” is the part I remember. So exceedingly stupid. At that moment I was just a child.
But Yvonne laughed and shook her hand from my grip, before handing me off to Florence Pratt. “No, Henry,” she said, “I am rotten inside”—but Florence, having come in in the middle, did not understand the joke. And as we moved across the room I could feel the cloud of her befuddlement making its own weather in between us, as Yvonne danced an outrageous tango with Dan Bolduke, who dipped her backbone into an impossible curl while she clawed the air with one of her high heels, the white of her leg slicing through a slit that ran the full length of her skirt.
WELL, HOW THE STORY ENDS, you know, same ending more or less as everyone’s story. My wife, Yvonne Beauchemin. . in the end all we can do is add them to memory’s legions. Of course, my wife’s is a different story, though sometimes I wonder how much different. Inside the body we are all much the same, just as a bird without its pelt of variegated feathers becomes a lump of undistinguished meat. And though it has been years since I’ve done any surgery, I remember in medical school being shocked by the sameness underneath the peeled-back human skin. Yes, you can see the tumor and the place where the broken bone has knitted back together — all the flaws that give us each our individual stamp. But these things are just a fraction of the body, compared with the bulk of what we hold in common.
ASHES
When his father died, Tim would have flown back to Chicago for the funeral, except that his father had insisted that there be none. “Why give everyone the chance to stand around jawing about what a son of a bitch I was?” he grumbled long-distance during the last days of his illness. “When I die, just throw me in the goddamn hole.”
But the hole was a problem, because Tim’s mother was buried in her family’s plot from which Tim’s father had gotten himself banished forever, after some bad behavior at the luncheon for the bereaved. And his second wife had years ago purchased a grave site for herself next to her first husband. Now she told Tim she’d decided “just to roll with” the plot she already had. Truth be told, her marriage to Tim’s father never really took like the first one did.
Best thing, she offered, would be for Sam to be shipped out West, let Tim decide where to take it from there.
These last words frightened Tim, who was not sure what “it” meant. For a few days he expected Sam to show up on his doorstep in a giant box with his toes poking out like a bunch of grapes.
So when the UPS man dropped off only a modest box full of packing peanuts, Tim was relieved; inside was a smaller cardboard box with a metal cap, marked HUMAN CREMAINS. Also enclosed were his father’s dog tags, and a bottle of Crown Royal whiskey in its purple bag, which Sam had bought when Tim was born, to be opened at his wedding. Maybe it’s time to admit defeat, his stepmother had scribbled on a scrap of paper.
Go on, add it up, Tim dared himself as he clawed through the peanuts: this twelve-year-old whiskey had sat for another forty-three years inside its bottle. Bringing the total to fifty-five, whiskey old enough to join the AARP.
TIM HAD TROUBLE thinking of himself as middle-aged; his young adulthood — the years his high school friends had married miserably and bred — he’d spent tromping around the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, working on and off in the Giffort Pinchot National Forest. Those days in the Giff: where had they gone? And how could they have left him with such a big gut in their wake?
One of Tim’s friends from the Forest Service had settled in the same town — and hurried over when the box came. “Tim’s wedding whiskey,” Ivan purred. “The pretty purple baby.”
“I’ve got the something old, and you’ve got the something borrowed,” Tim said as he pried the bottle from Ivan’s hands.
“Count your blessings, man.” Ivan settled into Tim’s battered recliner, kicking out the footrest. “If this was your wedding, you’d have a lot more people trying to horn in on the juice.”
Tim poured two tumblers a quarter full and knocked glasses with Ivan before he swallowed. The whiskey gave him a suntan from the inside out.
“Aaah,” Ivan exhaled from the back of his throat. “I could easily drink a whole fifth of this myself.”
A hockey game flickered on the TV with the sound turned down, while on the stereo Neil Young lit into another screeching guitar riff. Tim’s idea had been that he and Ivan, at this point in life his oldest buddy, would drink the whiskey with a quiet, ceremonial intent while Tim chewed on a few choice anecdotes about his father. But all he could think of was Sam standing outside, blasting the hose at dogs he suspected of shitting in his yard, Sam throwing his slipper at the TV, Sam borrowing Tim’s BB gun to shoot the mourning doves burbling outside the window. Then Ivan began to play some serious air guitar, his head thrown back, his mouth a crater with a crumbling rim. Watching him, Tim felt himself getting annoyed at the fact that Ivan had grown the exact same beard as him without asking his permission. A U-shaped goatee without the mustache, something to gain a little cred with the high school kids, down whose throats each year Tim crammed the Louisiana Purchase.
“What’s wrong?” Ivan asked, sitting up.
Tim shook his head. “Nothing.” The bottle was sitting in the kitchenette next to the morning’s dishes, the neck sticking from the felt bag like a headless aborigine shrugging from her frumpy dress. “Nothing except that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be me and my dad wearing cummerbunds and sneaking swigs behind the church.”
“Oh, I had a wedding once. Believe me, it was overrated,”
“It’s not just the wedding. Forget the wedding.” Tim took the glass that Ivan handed him, full up to the rim. “I should be drinking this to celebrate something momentous, an event worth remembering for the rest of my life. Not, you know—” He waved at the apartment, the TV:
“This.”
“Hey, what’s wrong with this?” Ivan blustered, sucking the sloppage from his hand. “Who’s to say that thirty years from now you’re not going to think back on this afternoon and say, Boy, one thing I will always remember is that afternoon when my old buddy Ivan and I sat around watching the Blackhawks whomp the living bejesus out of the Pittsburgh Penguins. And we drank this bottle of the greatest hooch I’ve ever tasted.”
“Yeah, right,” Tim said with a rueful laugh. “The Pittsburgh fucking Penguins.”