To Roger, Patrick said, “You’ve hardly said a word all night. All day. My friend. Tell me something. I’ve told you things. I’ve told you that Bunny and I are on our way to the zoo. I’ve told you we were going to look at all the crazy animals. I’ve told you that you can hold your son. I want you to tell me something I can write down. Tell me something, fucker,” he said to Roger, and immediately regretted this. “I’m sorry. I am sorry.”
“Don’t,” the other man said.
Don’t? Don’t what? Don’t be sorry? Don’t say these things? Don’t apologize? Don’t ask Roger to apologize?
Roger placed his hand on Gregory’s back. He moved his hand gently, stroking the boy. As Patrick watched this, it came into his mind to say, “Don’t wake him.” Another “don’t.” Was that what Roger had meant? Don’t ask me not to touch my son?
“Gregory.” Roger said his son’s name. “Gregory.”
The boy’s face was wrinkled from lying against his arms and the edge of the bar. He was coming awake. How long had he been sleeping? What was the time? How could there be a bar without a clock?
Patrick removed his malfunctioning pen from his pocket. But by the time he’d got the pen out he’d forgotten his subject. His subject had been? What were his subjects? Patrick’s subjects were the usual subjects. There was another of his unfunny jokes. Patrick’s subject had been time. But he’d forgotten time. Why was he holding his pen? He put it away. Was it leaking? No, that wetness Patrick felt was water dripping on him from the bottom of his glass. How much had he drunk? Or maybe the wetness was a spot of ink soaking through the lining of his coat, staining his shirt above his heart.
And Patrick, unwilling or unable to allow himself to be vanquished by Roger, said, sharply, “Hey, everybody, I’m bleeding to death!”
That did it. That brought on the tempest. Could anything have hurt Patrick more than to hear the boy cry out at the sound of his, Patrick’s, voice?
“No crying, Bunny. Okay, no crying? No need to cry. I’m going to pick you up! You’ll be happy in the air! Are you ready to be happy?”
He looked across at Gregory’s father. One last look before leaving. He believed he knew in that instant what he saw in Roger’s eyes.
And with that he leaned close to Gregory, picked up the Scotch and soda from the bar, raised the glass to the boy’s lips, and said, “Here. Don’t cry.”
SOLACE
They were children of parents who’d acted grotesquely, some might say violently, toward them, even when they were fairly little, and when, in their early thirties, they met and began sharing confidences, their discovery of this common ground — for that was how she thought of it — seemed to her a great, welcome solace. At last! she thought more than once during the weeks and months after they’d started going to bed together — always at friends’ places, because they were both in transitional periods and didn’t have anywhere comfortably private; she was saving money by sleeping on a foldout sofa in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment in the East Twenties that she shared with her friend Susan, while he, also recently forced to cut expenses, was installed uptown in a rented room in the apartment of an older, intimidating former co-worker, also named Susan. At last! Jennifer said to herself many times before falling asleep after sex in some friend’s or friend of a friend’s freshly changed bed. Then she would squeeze his hand.
One morning after this way of life had been going on for a while — it was the day after the summer solstice, and they were occupying their sixth or seventh borrowed apartment, getting away from their Susans for the weekend — Christopher woke early. He pushed back the sheet and the thin bedspread, rolled off the strange mattress, and, leaving her sleeping, went searching for coffee in Bert and Lucie’s kitchen. He moved down the line of melamine cabinets, opening and shutting the white doors. The open, uncurtained kitchen window gave him a view of a treeless back courtyard and neighbors’ windows directly opposite. There was no breeze. Living without air-conditioning or blinds was, Christopher thought, exactly the kind of thing his friends Bert and Lucie would do; it was a statement about iconoclasm or freedom or hedonism, and there was more evidence of it, the ambiguous statement, everywhere in the apartment — in the preponderance of tacky objects from the sixties and seventies, in the bright upholstery colors on the couch and podlike chairs, in the large fish tank inhabited by a piranha.
Christopher put water on the stove and turned on the burner. There, on the counter beside the refrigerator, was the gin bottle. But where was the coffee? He was naked.
They’d met at the end of the previous winter, at a dinner party thrown by a movie producer for whom Christopher had once done some legal work. The producer’s husband had been seated directly across the table from Christopher, and on the husband’s right was Jennifer. Shortly after the halibut came out, Christopher remembered, this man had dropped his napkin on the floor beside her chair, then boldly leaned into her space to reach for it. As he reached down, his forehead bumped the side of her left breast. And that wasn’t all. Coming up after grabbing the napkin, the husband, in a show of spatial awareness or perhaps a feigned considerateness, moved backward to avoid a second contact. Instead of sitting straight in his seat, however, he paused, his body bent awkwardly over, his face close to the breast, which he gazed at, it seemed to Christopher, with intensity. In a mock-formal voice, addressing the breast, the husband growled, “Pardon,” then sat upright and laughed, forcing Jennifer to grimace out at the table as she shared the joke. But what was the joke?
“You’re Charlie Harrison’s friend!” she shouted at Christopher before coffee was served, before they pushed back their chairs and wandered off to find privacy — the sloppiness of the people around them making it possible for them to seek refuge with each other — in a bedroom.
“Charlie,” he said, and finished chewing. Then he thought: Christ, why bring that up?
Down the table, a man who’d drunk too much knocked his glass across a plate, and there was a commotion.
“You’ve got to speak up!” she called over the noise. “I can’t hear a word you’re saying!”
“How do you know Charlie?” he asked loudly, and she yelled back, “I wouldn’t say I know him!”
“I don’t, either! I mean, I don’t not know him! I know him”—gathering steam—“but, well, not well, anymore. I knew him!” What was he doing? Why was he blurting?
“I understand! I understand completely!” she shouted at him. “Here’s to old acquaintances!” She leaned over her plate, raised her glass in her hand, and, in a softer voice, told him, “My name’s Jennifer.”
Was she making a toast? He had nothing in his glass but water. It occurred to him that she’d maybe had a bad experience with his ex-friend, that she and Charlie had possibly slept together. He tilted himself forward to meet her halfway. A candle burned between them, and he moved it aside. Her eyes were brown and somewhat cloudy; he made a point of looking into them when he said, “It’s bad luck to toast with water.”
“We don’t want bad luck.”
So he picked up a wineglass from among the scattered dishes, one that had been filled but seemed not to belong to anyone, and raised it to his mouth and took a quick fake drink, even that a violation of the major rule he lived by, the rule he tried not to violate too often or — since most nights he was, after all, likely to break down — too early in the evening. But it wasn’t early in the evening, was it?