No one stages a scene in front of plate glass during happy hour, and Benny did not. He sat listening with studied impassivity and noted glumly that Nan had prettied herself for this confrontat
ion — blouse with plunge, heels, necklace, red nail polish — in case of a scene. She’d want to make a good impression on witnesses if there was a first-ever Bennyish outburst. Her lacquered beauty enraged him, so he sat quietly seething, radiating bogus serenity.
“You’re not looking at the picture,” Nan said. “I said I was sorry about all this.”
“Exactly right. I accept your apology.”
“Please don’t shout.”
“You wish I were shouting,” Benny said, ostentatiously whispering. “You can hardly hear me. My dial is turned all the way down. We’re in the negative numbers now.” His hand shaking, Benny took a sip of his festive Bloody Mary. “So what’s this guy’s name?”
Nan peevishly put her phone back into her purse. “What? His name?”
“Yeah. You know, his name.”
“Well, his name isn’t him. A name is so…whatever. His identity is his own,” Nan said in a vague monotone, watching a toddler walk by outside clutching a teddy bear in one hand, his other hand in his father’s. “Okay,” she said, apparently gathering her thoughts while rubbing her left knuckle with her right thumb. “So maybe I’ll tell you.” Clearly the name constituted a difficulty, a distraction. Benny waited for whatever she would say, and while he waited he noticed that she gave off a scent of lavender, which, he feared, was from massage oil.
“Go right ahead,” Benny said, sensing an advantage.
“Okay, but you’re going to laugh. I know you. His name’s Thor.”
“Thor?” Benny exclaimed. “That’s a good one. He must be from around here. That’s a real Minnesota name for you. Is he a Lutheran?”
“See, I knew you would be like that. Under your nice hides the snide. And I have to point out that you’re being defensive. Talk about the predictability factor! Like I said, I feel bad for you and I blame myself, but I’m glad I’m moving on to those green pastures they all tell you about.”
On the other side of the plate-glass window, civilians went about their business, seemingly indifferent to the wars of love, and from time to time they glanced in at Benny and Nan, the pleasant-looking young couple sitting at a bar table, apparently lost in conversation. The midsummer sun eased itself behind an office building, casting a conical shadow that pierced Benny with melancholy, while the bar slowly filled up with professional-managerial types getting off work in time for happy hour, the men loosening their collars, the women quickly, almost surreptitiously, checking their faces in the mahogany-framed mirror above the bar. To the side, a couple of outcast full-figured ladies in slimming dresses leaned toward each other in the corner, whispering.
The stars wheeled in the empty space of Benny’s desolation. He would tell Dennis about the wheeling stars. Dennis would be amused.
He took another sip of his drink as he fought off soul-nausea and the urge to beg. The in-surge of employees getting off work was tidal now. They were making a racket. He would not tell Nan how much he had loved her, the size and mature intensity of that love, its ability to give his life meaning. A man does not beg to be taken back, he reminded himself. Begging qualifies as the primary criterion for admission to loserdom, that territory inhabited by platoons of nice vanilla guys who belong in civilized places like Denmark and Sweden, not here in the United States, where they are held in contempt and trampled.
He habitually carries images around in his head. Chained to his consciousness at that moment as he sat across from her was one of Nan. The morning after their first night together, she had stood over his little apartment’s gas stove scrambling some eggs for them both, the sunlight streaming through the east window backlighting her hair in glory. She wore a cream-colored nightgown that set off her tanned skin to good effect. Benny and Nan had shared a nearly sleepless night of lovemaking. By morning they were love gods. He rose out of bed with the succulent sea urchin taste of her clitoris still on his tongue. Inspired by the sunlight and her bare feet on the linoleum and her expression of sleepy sensual concentration and the smell of the garlic and the salsa in the eggs, he thought he was the luckiest man alive at that particular hour, that morning, on the planet. Wilhelm Reich was correct: orgasms constituted the meaning of life. The kindly knife of sentiment stabbed at him again and again.
It occurred to him that maybe he hadn’t actually known Nan as a person, despite his memories of her. She had said, several times, jokingly, that he was self-deluded. Perhaps she was inexplicable, or maybe he was. Returning to the present moment from his reverie, he tried to look at her across the bar table. Her inexplicable mouth was moving in a half smile: she was saying inexplicable things about how she had felt that way then and felt this way now. More apologies came out of her.
Following the nausea and the stabbing and the pecking crows and the murderous rage, sadness dropped over him like a cone, inside of which all the oxygen consisted of more sadness. Time undoubtedly passed at Whiskey Sour’s, and the waitress replaced his drink with another. Had he said anything? He couldn’t remember if he had spoken up or had remained silent as the bar filled with merrymakers, and Nan continued to explain whatever she was explaining. His Bloody Mary glass somehow emptied the Bloody Mary into his mouth. The celery stick in the drink poked at his lip. His mind raced and stopped, raced and stopped. Nan — composed, elegant — sipped her Tom Collins and dabbed her bread in olive oil as she spoke. What was she saying now? One woman over at the bar suddenly screamed with laughter. Thank God, Benny thought: someone can scream.
As the bar grew noisier, Benny and Nan gazed at each other without tenderness, in the hard labor of separation. He felt the first wellsprings of hatred — liberating, a breeze from the soul’s window. You have to hate them first if you’re going to break up with them. Gathering himself, he nodded at her, stood up with what he hoped was quiet dignity, and left her with the bar bill. At the entryway, like Orpheus, he turned to see her one last time. Would she follow him or at least keep an eye on him as he walked away? Certainly not: she was gazing through the window glass toward the street, studiously ignoring his departure and, worse, wearing a grim smirk as she reached back down into her purse for her phone. She’d give this Thor the good news: free, now and forever. Free to be you and me! No more Benny! She didn’t look up as she tapped the letters.
—
All night Benny fought the beast of jealous rage, and he drank. Four a.m. found him in a whiskey stupor, lying on the floor in his apartment, cursing Nan and contemplating creative bedlam.
By morning, he had acquired an atom-smashing headache. His brain was a particle accelerator, throwing off broken pieces of thought. He emptied the savings account meant to pay off his student loans, transporting the cash out of the bank in a brown grocery bag he’d brought with him. The oversaturated sunlight blazed down on his hair, and his car’s interior smelled like a bakery oven. Back at home, cash in hand, he wrote a letter to the dean of admissions of the architecture school he had planned to attend in September, saying that he would not be arriving this fall, or ever. Then he called Dennis.