Mick had his father’s old apron, and he always wore it when he went to mass. He still owned the old man’s cleaver, too, but he left that home. His father had begun each day at the butchers’ mass; Mick would get up from his knees and go off to bed — in one of several apartments around town with a name other than his own on the deed or lease, at the farm upstate, or on the old leather couch in his office at Grogan’s. And, unlike his father, he didn’t ordinarily take communion.
Once, though, we had both stepped up to the altar, had in turn taken the wafer. He’d had the cleaver with him earlier that night, and had cut fresh meat with it. We had both of us bloodied our aprons before standing together in a singular act of sacrilege or piety, as you prefer.
Had my old friend put fresh blood on that apron?
Come to mass with me, he’d urge me now, as the night turned to morning. Not tonight, I’d always say. Another time, perhaps, but not tonight.
Elaine stopped going to her class.
One night we were at dinner and I realized that she was supposed to be in a classroom. I started to say something and she stopped me. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I dropped the course.”
“Why?”
“Except I didn’t do anything as formal as drop it. I just stopped going. When you’re not taking these things for credit there’s no point in withdrawing formally. That would be like sending a certified letter to Channel Thirteen telling them you were about to turn off Nova. Why bother? You can just click the remote and watch Roseanne like the rest of America.”
I asked her how come she didn’t want to go anymore.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Because it’s bullshit,” she said. “Because I’m such a cliché, another old broad with time on her hands and nothing to do with it, I’m like the lilies of the field, I don’t toil and I don’t spin, and what fucking good am I?”
“I thought you enjoyed the classes.”
“They’re not my life.”
“No.”
“They can’t be my life. I don’t have a life. That’s the problem.”
I didn’t know what to say, what to suggest. And, while I was trying to think of something, her mood changed. It was as if she’d hit a button on her own personal remote and switched herself to another channel.
“Enough of that,” she said. “No long faces, no soul-searching in public places. People like to see you smile. At least that’s what they taught us in Call Girl School.”
Every few days I would pick up the phone and call Lisa. Sometimes I called her in the afternoon, sometimes late at night. She was almost always home. I would ask if I could come over. She would always tell me to come.
After a while she changed the message on her machine, replacing Glenn’s final phrases with some equally bland lines of her own. My first reaction, once I’d realized that I hadn’t dialed a wrong number, was one of relief that I wouldn’t have to listen to that voice from the spirit world anymore, wouldn’t have to hear the man out before I got to speak with his wife.
But the next time I heard her message I could hear his voice along with it, intoning lines from “Flanders Fields.”
I never saw her outside of the apartment, never called her to talk, never took her downstairs for a cup of coffee or a bite to eat. I would go over there, early or late. She might be wearing anything — jeans and a sweatshirt, a skirt and sweater, a nightgown. We would talk. She told me about growing up in White Bear Lake, and about the way her father had started coming to her bed when she was nine or ten. He did everything but put it inside her. That would be wrong, he told her.
I told her war stories, sketched word portraits of some of the characters I’d known over the years, the unusual specimens I’d encountered on either side of the law. That way I could hold up my end of the conversation without revealing very much of myself, which was fine with me.
And we would go to bed.
One afternoon, with a Patsy Cline record playing in the background, she asked me what I figured we were doing. Just being together, I suggested.
“No,” she said. “You know what I mean. What’s the point? Why are you here?”
“Everybody’s got to be someplace.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are. I don’t have any answers. I’m here because I want to be here, but I don’t know why that is.”
Patsy was singing about faded love.
“I hardly leave this apartment,” Lisa said. “I sit at the window and look at New Jersey. I could be out making the rounds, showing my book to art directors, calling the people I know, trying to get some work. Tomorrow, I tell myself. Next week, next month. After the first of the year. What the hell, everybody knows there’s no work now. The economy’s a mess. Everybody knows that.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been looking for work, so how do I know it’s not out there? But how can I work up any enthusiasm for the struggle when I’ve got all that money just sitting there?”
“If you’re not under any pressure—”
“I could be doing my own work,” she said. “But I don’t do that either. I sit around. I look at TV. I watch the sun go down. I wait for you to call. I hope you won’t call, but that’s what I’m waiting for. For you to call.”
I waited in similar fashion, waited for my own action, to call or not to call. I won’t call her today, I would decide. And sometimes I’d stick to my decision. And sometimes I wouldn’t.
“Why do you come over here, Matt?”
“I don’t know.”
“What am I, do you figure? Am I a drug? Am I a bottle of booze?”
“Maybe.”
“My father drank. I know I told you that.”
“Yes.”
“The other day when you kissed me I had the sense that there was something missing, and I realized what it was. It was the smell of whiskey on your breath. We don’t need a psychiatrist to figure that one out, do we?”
I didn’t say anything. I remember our faded love, sang Patsy Cline.
“So I guess that’s what’s in it for me,” she said. “I get to have Daddy in bed with me, and I don’t have to worry that Mommy’ll hear us because she’s all the way across town. And he wouldn’t put it in. He thought it was a sin.”
“So do I.”
“You do?”
I nodded. “But I do it anyway,” I said.
Later that same day she talked about her late husband. We never talked about Elaine, I had ruled out that topic of conversation, but I couldn’t presume to tell her I didn’t want to hear about him either.
“I wonder if he expected this,” she said.
“This?”
“Us. I think he did.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. He admired you, I know that much.”
“He thought I could be useful.”
“It was more than that. He put it in my mind to call you. You called me, I realize that, but I was going to call you. I remember he told me once that if a person was ever in a jam, you’d be a good person to call. He said it with a certain intensity, too, as if he wanted to make sure I would remember later. It’s as if he was telling me to call you if anything ever happened to him.”
“You could be reading more into his words than he put there.”