With that, he pulled the bedroom door closed, but the past had already escaped.
2
There are big days and then there are big days, the latter totaling maybe a dozen in an entire life. I’m talking about the kinds of days that can be called to mind for better or for worse years after the fact — wedding days, divorce days, birthdays of children, the death days of parents, the days that coveted promotions were given or dreaded pink slips handed out. In other words, transformative days that alter the direction of an entire life.
This, by way of explanation, would be one of those days.
I was scheduled to be married. The lucky woman? One Maggie Kane, who entered my life approximately a year before, and then every bit as quickly fled from it. When I finally caught her in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris in a story too complicated to get into here, I vowed to myself that I would never let her go.
So much for that vow. Now I wanted nothing more than to let her go. Problem was, I was due to marry her in about seven hours. I’m not saying that I’m normal, just desperate, and the whirring hands of Father Time were hardly in my favor.
It was 8:00 a.m., March 21. I stepped from wind-whipped Hanover Street, the main thoroughfare through Boston’s North End, into Caffe Vittoria, the oldest and best coffee shop in town and the anchor to my morning routine. I’d order a double cappuccino, take my place at a window table to read the morning papers, listen to some of the ancient goombahs tell me that I write like the Irish cook, and then head off to the newsroom of the Boston Record, where I’d spend another day digging another journalistic ditch until I finally had a hole big enough to bury another villain. Next day, I’d do it all over again. It may not be much, but I consider it a pretty good life.
A life, mind you, that I suddenly realized I wanted to hang on to, in all its ever-so-subtle glory and unsubtle individuality.
“You look like a man about to lose his freedom.”
That was Kenny, the server who works the espresso and cappuccino machines like Arthur Fiedler used to work the Boston Pops — except Arthur had a shock of white hair where Kenny has none, and Arthur had a refined build, while Kenny looks like he just stepped off the pages of Steroids Monthly. At your neighborhood Starbucks, he’d be called a barista, or maybe that’s a venti. I don’t know. At Vittoria, given that he’s about six feet four inches tall and even his eyebrows seem to have muscles, most people simply call him “sir.”
“No, just my virginity,” I replied.
Wedding day. Virginity. Get it? Everyone in the joint doubled over in knee-slapping hilarity.
Well, okay, nobody doubled over in any sort of hilarity. Actually, they didn’t even laugh. Truth is, I’ve known them all too long and too well, these faux crotchety old guys with names like Sal and Vinny, and they’ve heard too much of my schtick before. Why I even continue to try is testament to my true spirit of American optimism. Either that, or I can’t help myself.
Kenny put a big cup of cappuccino on the counter for me before I even asked, along with my usual bagel, and I retired to my regular table in the window, opened up my New York Times, and didn’t — or maybe couldn’t — read a word. The lead story was about another car bomb explosion at a checkpoint in Iraq that I couldn’t pronounce. I scanned down the page and was surprised I didn’t see a headline that said something like, “Jack Flynn about to surrender life as he knows it.” Drop head: “Is he nuts?”
A guy named Tony, a retired plumber, put his pastry down at a nearby table and called out, “Jack, this is a wonderful thing you’re doing. It’ll be great to get another marriage under your belt. You’ll get yourself familiar with a good lawyer, learn where the best sandwich shop is around the divorce court, the easiest places to park, maybe start a working relationship with the judge. This’ll pay off in spades as you get older.”
“Thanks, Tony. You’re like another father to me.”
My name, by the way, is Jack Flynn, and maybe, in fact, I am nuts. But before I could address that question, I had to consider another: Did I love Maggie Kane? The answer: Damned if I know, which may, in fact, be all the answer I would really need.
I mean, I must have loved her when I gave her that ring on Christmas Eve not even three months before, right? She cried, and all right, so did I, and not just over the price. We talked about the life we were going to make, the successes we would see, the kids we might have. And then when we went to bed that night, the last woman I thought of before I drifted toward a restless sleep wasn’t Maggie, the wife I was about to have, but Katherine, the wife I had until she died six years before.
Time to get over it, Jack, I kept telling myself these past couple of years. Move on, let history dissolve into the present tense, still there, flavoring life, but secondary to current events.
But this issue was academic. What I had in front of me — a wedding — was ominously more realistic. The only real question I was forced to address this day, it was increasingly occurring to me, was how the flying fuck was I going to get out of it?
Think, Jack. Think.
“Congratulations, Jack, we’re all so thrilled for you. We had started to think you were gay.”
That was Don, short not for Donald, but Donatello, another member of the daily morning crew stopping by the table to shake hands with the happy groom-to-be.
“Don, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am myself. Before Maggie came along, I was starting to think you had a nice ass.”
He gave me a funny look, like I had carried the joke one notch too far. He returned to his usual seat, me to my dilemma.
By the way, it’s worth pointing out that this wedding was to occur at 4:00 p.m. before a justice of the peace in a conference room of Boston City Hall. There would be no family, no friends, no witnesses, no music, no flowers, no cake, no garter belt, no bridesmaids, no groomsmen, no wedding gown, no tuxedo, no band, no nothing but me and Maggie Kane getting married and heading straight to Logan Airport for our flight to Hawaii and a lifetime of frustration and emotional confinement. In other words, the logistics were somewhat simple in all this. I really only had to inform two people of my absence — Maggie and the JP. But that seemed small solace at the moment. I needed to figure out how.
Think, Jack. Think.
I folded the paper up, having read only about six words of it. I left three-quarters of my cappuccino in the cup and half my bagel on the plate, and I headed into a future that suddenly seemed colder than the worst winter’s day.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said to Kenny on my way out the door.
“No, you won’t. You’ll be sitting on some island being massaged by native women and oversexed by your new wife,” he replied.
No, I’d see him tomorrow. I just wasn’t of the mind to correct him right then.
At eight forty-five on a Tuesday morning, the newsroom of the Boston Record, the newsroom of any big city daily newspaper, for that matter, is a pretty desolate place. Most self-respecting reporters are still sitting at home in ratty bathrobes chugging black coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes, wondering who they’re going to screw that day and how they’re going to deliver said screwing by deadline. Or maybe not.
When I walked into the Record, only the omnipresent and always nervous Peter Martin, the editor in chief, was in the newsroom, undoubtedly plotting that day’s coverage, micromanaging his underlings before they even arrived at work, stressing over events that had yet to occur. I knew he was in the room because about thirty seconds after I had peeled off my coat and taken my seat, he appeared at my desk like a squirrel approaching a chestnut.