People surprise you. People disappoint you. Sure, you say to yourself, so-and-so was a disappointment, but this person, this person I know. And look what happens.
A more dispassionate man would have said, She doesn’t respect you. My friends said this.
You have to have the ability to see the facts without being sidetracked by the history. By your expectations. What are expectations? Rehearsing your own lack of imagination. Joanie’s not like that. Joanie’d never do that. Please. The Japs would never attack Pearl Harbor. John Hinckley was such a quiet boy.
Distance. What you need is distance.
What you do is you keep clear who your friends are. Who treated who like what.
Altruism is fine. Altruism is sweet. But you have to think of yourself. Because who else is going to?
And here’s something else nobody knows: the week before she got married, I sat in her mother’s kitchen three nights in a row until two in the morning, four in the morning, later than that. I wanted to know, out of curiosity, Did she think Gary was ready for something like this? Did she think she was? I was telling her over and over, He’s a good man. Fine. We know that. All’s I’m saying, Is he right for you? And she said, a little sad, but mostly smiling, Bruno, you haven’t given up, have you? I said, Forget me. Forget me. I’m talking about us. And she said, There is no us. There’s only you.
I kissed her good night that last night. She didn’t want to, but that was all there was to it. I had tears in my eyes. When I was up close to her, I whispered in her ear. I said, “You know this is wrong.” And when I let her go, she said, “Sometimes you gotta do the wrong thing.”
This is what she said to me after all our time together.
The morning of the wedding, I went over to see her again. This is how much pride I had. She was doing her hair in her mother’s bedroom. Her mother was thrilled I was there. I said I had an emergency message, coming through. All the way up the stairs, she’s trailing behind, tugging on my jacket flap. I had to hit her hand away. And I knock and peek into the room, with the mother standing behind me in the hall, and there she is, sitting there in her white already, three hours early, doing nothing, hands in her lap. And she goes, “What are you doing here?” What am I doing here. How many years, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, I been coming over here? How many years I’d come over, I’d spring for something?
Tonight on the phone, Joey said, “That didn’t teach you, nothing’ll teach you.”
He said, “Now do you believe me?”
I feel bad sometimes. I know I haven’t lived the right way. I know sometimes people got hurt. They’ll always be people like me, people who’re glad to be the way they are but also think, now and then, that maybe a vaccination somewhere didn’t take. Maybe it’s that simple. I read once, I think it was Meyer Lansky, he said, Some people just never learn to be good.
Joanie spent the time Todd was gone poking through his room. The dog wandered in to check on her, shouldering the half-closed door open and unhurriedly nosing around before leaving. She waited until the dog was gone and then pulled out everything he had hidden. The box of letters under the board games in the closet (Phalanx! Goal! Storm at Dieppe), the little red spiral notebook, the round candy tin his father bought him on their one trip to the Caribbean (Zombies: Coconut Chocolate Clusters). She knew where everything was. She’d found everything cleaning at one time or another.
The candy tin was filled with photos. Bruno mugging for the camera with his hands curled like a movie monster’s. Gary with a new ten-speed and long hair, a photo she’d taken when they’d first met. Audrey on the sofa. Audrey under the willow, a tennis ball in her mouth. Gary pushing Audrey down a snow pile in some kind of king-of-the-hill game. A picture her mother took of the three of them at the beach, Gary holding Todd’s boogie board and looking off, Todd holding her hand and staring straight at the camera. Gary painting the garage.
Near the bottom of the tin she came across a Polaroid of the three of them and felt a lurch, like she’d stepped on a loose rug. One side of the image was smeared the way Polaroids sometimes got. The photo was three years old. Bruno had taken it, in their kitchen. She and Gary were at the kitchen table, and Todd was standing between them. The overhead light, a fake Tiffany thing, was prominent. Todd was holding a coffee-table book Bruno’d just given him on football called The Gladiators. He was looking directly at the camera. Gary was lifting the salt shaker with two fingers and a thumb, and watching her in a sidelong way. He looked unhappy. She had her eyes on the table. Minutes before the picture had been taken, she’d collided with Bruno in the darkened living room. He was coming from the upstairs toilet, she didn’t remember why; she’d been going to get something to win an argument. Gary and Todd had been in the kitchen. Bruno had stopped her with his arm after their bump. His fingers had pressed her neck forward. He’d kissed her, softly, like he was putting a daughter to bed, and she’d kissed him.
Now, with the photo on the rug in front of her, seeing after all these years that moment, Gary’s face, and Todd’s expression, she thought, Had they known?
The door opened downstairs. She shut the lid of the tin and put everything back and just got out of the room by the time Todd hit the bottom of the staircase.
He stood with a hand on the railing, and they looked at each other.
She came down the stairs. He started up them. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said. “I didn’t hear a car. Audrey didn’t bark.”
“She doesn’t bark for Bruno anymore,” he said, like she should know that.
She eased over to let him past. She said, “How was the game?”
He looked at her, and she saw he was near tears. He continued up to his room, and she followed. He climbed onto his bed, and she went over and knelt next to him and took his shoulders and asked him what was wrong.
He was looking past her arm, and his expression changed so much she turned to follow his line of sight. There was a slightly curled black-and-white photograph on the rug.
“Get outta my room,” he said.
“Todd,” she said.
“Get outta my room,” he howled. He burst into tears. She tried to hug him but he fought her off. Audrey peeked in the door. Joanie got up and held her hands at her sides like they were wet, and then backed out of the room and shut the door behind her.
She pitched into the upstairs bathroom and sat on the toilet and put her face in her hands. “Oh, God,” she said.
The phone rang. It kept ringing.
“Answer the phone,” he shouted. His voice scared her so much she jumped up.
“I’m getting it, I’m getting it,” she said.
She ran downstairs and snatched it up.
“I’ll tell you, my husband,” Nina said. “They’re gonna make a movie about him, called Lights On, Windows Open: The Sandro Mucherino Story. Oh, how he wastes energy.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Joanie said.
“How are you?” Nina said. “Todd back yet?”
“Ma, I got no time,” Joanie said.
“You got no time,” her mother said. “I say one sentence, you got no time?”
Joanie put her hand over her eyes while she stood there holding the phone, and pulled downward like she was trying to take off a mask. “Whaddaya want, Ma?”