How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (8 page)

The year before Mike nearly throttled Brian, it was Aidan's turn. He was the baby of the family, which seemed to be his complaint—that we treated him as such. That we didn't give him enough respect. The specific catalyst, this Thanksgiving, was obscure. That he was drunk in the manner unique to inexperienced drinkers—he was a senior at Hotchkiss at the time—didn't especially help his case, and sensing this, he became even more frustrated and strident.

“Just because I'm younger … it doesn't give
you
guys the right to treat me like I'm a
kid
. Mom wouldn't have let you. If she was here, she'd tell you.”

“If she
were
here,” Brian said.

“That's
exactly
what I mean. Treating me like a friggin' baby.”

We all found it cute that even in his cups, Aidan had used the euphemism rather than the Anglo-Saxonism itself. He wasn't yet ready to cuss in front of Dad. Brian and Mike started sniggering, which further infuriated Aidan, who pounded his fist down on his plate, breaking it in half and cutting his hand on his steak knife, which had been freshly sharpened by Dad that morning. We all agreed that Jennifer was the only one sober enough to drive to the emergency room.

The touch-football games preceding dinner were sometimes an outlet for aggression that might otherwise have overflowed at the table, but it occasionally spilled over, as when Brian accused Mike of unnecessary roughness on the field that afternoon. At Christmas, the sport was hockey, assuming that the pond was sufficiently frozen. Our mother, who believed that exercise and fresh air were essential ingredients of the good life, had inaugurated both of these activities.

We really should have just canceled Thanksgiving the year the movie came out. Anyone could have predicted disaster. Brian spent more than three years working on the screenplay, on his own at first and eventually in collaboration with the director. (His second play, about preppy young bohemians in TriBeCa, had opened to mixed reviews and closed after an eight-week run.) Somewhere in the screenwriting process, the story had acquired a new complication, when the dying mother confides in her sensitive son about her affair with his father's best friend.

In fact, Dad's best friend lived in San Francisco, as Brian was quick to point out later, but still, it made us wonder. Mom had been popular with most of the men in our parents’ circle of friends, and one husband, Tom Fleishman, had always seemed almost comically smitten. Now we started to question if it was really a joke, the way Fleishman had always mooned around Mom, or whether Brian had really been the recipient of some deathbed confession. Everyone in town had the same question, including Katy Fleishman, who called Dad in a fury after seeing the movie in September, demanding to know what he knew, and it soon became the talk of the country club. The play had been a distant rumor, but the movie was right there next door to the Pathmark store, in the Regal Cinema multiplex, which had replaced the old downtown theaters where we'd watched
Jaws
and
Summer of ‘42
. And it was more successful than some might have hoped, buoyed by the performance of Maureen Firth as the wife and mother. The movie played at the Regal for seven weeks. Everyone we knew went to see it.

Brian had warned us, to some extent. On the one hand, he assured us, his vision hadn't been compromised. On the other hand, accommodations had been made, nuances flattened, whispers amplified, subtexts excavated with a backhoe and laid bare. In the play there was a rumor of infatuation.

None of us, Foster excepted, had been invited to the premiere in L.A., or rather, we'd all received a phone call from Brian, who had mentioned in passing “a big industry ratfuck” and said, “I'm not even sure I'm going myself.”

And none of us knew quite what to say after we'd seen it. Brian wrote Dad a letter, assuring him that the alleged affair was strictly a Hollywood plot device and had nothing to do with reality. Dad called Foster in New York and was repeatedly reassured. Mike called Brian, threatening to kick his ass, and while the conversation was hardly conclusive, Brian swore that the affair was just a sensationalistic fiction, and it seemed as if maybe we had all had our say by the time Thanksgiving had come around. We were hoping against hope that the issue would just go away; in an unprecedented move, we even decided to water down the vodka just to keep Dad from getting too maudlin.

And for the first time since any of us could remember, it looked as if we might pass a relatively peaceful Thanksgiving, having made it all the way to the pumpkin pie without major fireworks. But despite the watered vodka, we could see Dad's eyes glazing over with melancholy reminiscence.

“I must have let her down somehow,” he said during a lull in the discussion of the Patriots’ season.

All of us were smart enough to pretend we hadn't heard this remark, but Aidan's fiancée was still new to the family.

“Let whom down, Mr. C?”

“Carolyn. I must've let her down. She must have needed something I couldn't give her.”

“But why would you think that?” Jennifer asked.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Mike said, throwing his napkin down on the table. “Look at what you've done, Brian. Now he actually believes it.”

“Dad,” Brian said, “I told you: It never happened. It's fiction.”

“It's slander,” Mike said. “I still can't understand why the hell you'd drag our mother's name into the gutter like that.”

“It's not our mother. It's not her name. It's a character in a movie.”

“A character based on our mother.”

“I just must have failed her,” Dad said, oblivious to the conversation around him.

“Dad, listen to me. It never happened. I'm sorry. It's my fault. I shouldn't have written what I wrote. It was the director's idea, a cheap plot device. It isn't true.”

“I always thought it was harmless,” Dad said. “They used to talk at parties, and I knew they had things in common. Your mother had so many interests, art and theater, and I couldn't really talk to her about those things. I knew she and Tom talked. But I thought that's all it was.”

“That
is
all it was,” Brian said. “At least so far as I know.”

“I know she told you things,” he said to Brian. “Things she couldn't tell me.”

“Not that, Dad. She never told me anything like that.”

“After my operation,” he said, “I was afraid. I was afraid of physical, you know, exertion.”

“Dad, that's enough.”

“Are you happy with yourself?” Mike asked as the tears rolled down our father's cheeks.

“Well, who's for a smoke outside?” Foster said, rising from the table. Although Dad was a lifelong smoker, our mother had, toward the end of her life, insisted that all smoking be done outdoors, a rule that Dad himself continued to observe and enforce after she was gone.

A half hour after we put Dad to bed, Mike tackled Brian and got him in a headlock, choking him and rubbing his face in the snow. “Tell the truth, goddamn it. What did she tell you? Is it true?”

“I told you: It's not true. She never told me anything.”

But nothing could ever quite dispel the doubt for us. Dad might have been forgiven for lying low, but he was determined to show himself on the local holiday party circuit. A week before Christmas, after three cocktail parties, he crashed his Mustang into an elm tree half a mile from the house.

Mike, who was working in Schenectady, was the first to arrive at the hospital. Dad was in intensive care. Aidan drove over from Amherst, arriving shortly before midnight. Brian and Foster arrived from New York just as the sun was rising and Dad was declared stable. We all spent the day at the hospital and that night traded shifts in the waiting room. Dad looked gruesome when we finally got to see him, his face bruised and puffy and green where it wasn't bandaged, his leg in traction. He was pretty doped up. “Don't tell your mother,” he said when he saw us. “I don't want her to worry.”

The doctor, who'd tended our mother in her final days, said, “It's the Demerol.”

“We could all use some of that,” Foster said.

We moved between the hospital and the house for the next ten days, keeping ourselves busy with Christmas preparations. We found a perfectly shaped blue spruce tree in the woods at the edge of the lake and we retrieved the ornaments from the attic in the old boxes from England's department store, closed years before, with Mom's block letters fading on the cardboard:
CHRISTMAS LIGHTS, CHRISTMAS ANGELS, CHRISTMAS BULBS.
We avoided talking about what had happened or why, concentrating instead on the practical details.

The lake had frozen early that year. After lunch on Christmas Eve, we gathered up our gear, called Ricky and Ted Quinlan next door, and trudged down for the annual hockey game. It was Foster, Ted and Aidan against Brian, Ricky and Mike. Brian's team scored two quick goals. Aidan, who had the fiercest competitive streak of any of us, started to get physical. First he hooked Brian's skate and tripped him; then he body-checked him into the rocks of the causeway. Brian returned the favor the next time he came down the ice with the puck, knocking Aidan off into the bulrushes. He came out swinging, and caught Brian in the helmet with his stick. Then he threw him down and knelt on top of him, ripping off his helmet and punching his face. By the time we pulled him off, there was blood everywhere and one of Brian's teeth was protruding through his lip.

“You bastard,” Aidan sobbed. “You selfish bastard.”

Brian turned away and limped up the hill, leaving a trail of blood on the ice.

When we got back up to the house, Brian was gone.

Dad came home on New Year's Day. Aidan took winter term off from school to be with him, and Mike came over from Schenectady on the weekends. Brian called from New York to check in. Neither the fight on the ice nor his sudden departure was ever discussed again. From time to time, in his cups, Dad would ask Brian about our mother, and he would always insist that both the affair and the confession were completely fictional. Dad once confronted Tom Fleishman at the country club and he, too, denied it. But Dad could never put the question out of his mind, any more than he could walk without a cane.

Mike and Jennifer had three boys, and he became the youngest vice president ever at GE. Aidan spent a year with the U.S. ski team before marrying Alana and going back to Hotchkiss to teach. Foster, one of the most respected directors in New York, recently married Cassie Haynes, the actress who first appeared at our house as Brian's date. We go down to see his plays from time to time.

Brian moved to Los Angeles a few weeks after Aidan busted his lip. He wrote a TV pilot based on his second play, and became a producer when Showtime developed the series. We can't help feeling relieved that he's not writing about the family, and Dad watches the show every week. Brian is very well paid for his efforts and has been dating a series of extremely pretty actresses. But it also feels somehow like a cheat, a big fucking letdown. After all these years of having to put up with the idea of Brian as a great genius, of knowing that our mother believed in his special destiny, we feel like the least he could do would be to justify her favor and her hopes. Nothing short of greatness could justify the doubt he cast on her memory. Foster believes that he's doing penance and that he'll go back to his real work someday.

In the meantime, we haven't all been together at Thanksgiving since Dad's accident. Now, when the leaves turn red and yellow and the grass turns white with morning frost, we feel the loss all over again. It's like we were a goddess cult that gathered once a year and now our faith has wavered. It's not that we couldn't forgive her anything. But our simple certainties have been shaken. Although we will always be Catholics, we long ago gave up on the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We were a coven of Mariolatry, devoted to the Virgin. Brian believed in art, but lately he seems to have lost the faith. We find it hard to believe in anything we can't see or explain according to the immutable laws imbued in science class. We always believed in you, Mother, more than anything, but we never for a moment thought you were human.

2007

Third Party

Difficult to describe precisely, the taste of that eighth or ninth cigarette of the day, a mix of ozone, blond tobacco and early-evening angst on the tongue. But he recognized it every time. It was the taste of lost love.

Alex started smoking again whenever he lost a woman. When he fell in love again, he would quit. And when love died, he'd light up again. Partly it was a physical reaction to stress; partly metaphorical—the substitution of one addiction for another. And no small part of this reflex was mythological—indulging a romantic image of himself as a lone figure standing on a bridge in a foreign city, cigarette cupped in his hand, his leather jacket open to the elements.

He imagined the passersby speculating about his private sorrow as he stood on the Pont des Arts, mysterious, wet and unapproachable. His sense of loss seemed more real when he imagined himself through the eyes of strangers—the pedestrians with their evening baguettes and their Michelin guides and their umbrellas, hunched against the March precipitation, an alloy of drizzle and mist.

When it all ended with Lydia, he'd decided to go to Paris, not only a good place to smoke but also an appropriate backdrop. His grief was more poignant and picturesque there. Bad enough that Lydia had left him; what made it worse was that it was his own fault; he suffered both the ache of the victim and the guilt of the villain. His appetite had not suffered, however. His stomach was complaining like a terrier demanding its evening walk, blissfully unaware that the household was in mourning. Ennobling as it might seem to suffer in Paris, only a fool would starve himself there.

Standing in the middle of the bridge, he tried to decide which way to go. Having dined the previous night in a bistro that had looked grim and authentic enough for his purposes but had proved to be full of voluble Americans and Germans attired as if for the gym or the tropics, he decided to head for the Hôtel Costes, where, at the very least, the Americans would be jaded and dressed in shades of gray and black.

The bar was full and, of course, no tables were available when he arrived. The hostess, a pretty Asian sylph with a West London accent, sized him up skeptically. Hers was not the traditional Parisian hauteur, the sneer of the maître d'hôtel at a three-star restaurant; she was, rather, the temple guardian of an international tribe that included rock stars, fashion models, designers, actors and directors—as well as those who photographed, wrote about and slept with them. As the art director of a boutique ad agency, Alex lived on the fringes of this world. In New York, he knew many of the doormen and maître d's, but here the best he could hope was that he looked the part. The hostess seemed to be puzzling over his claims to membership, her expression slightly hopeful, as if she was on the verge of giving him the benefit of the doubt. Suddenly her narrow squint morphed into a smile of recognition. “I'm sorry. I didn't recognize you,” she said. “How are you?” Alex had been there only twice, on a visit a few years before, so it seemed unlikely he would've been remembered. On the other hand, he was a generous tipper and, he reasoned, not a bad-looking guy.

She led him to a small but highly visible table set for four. He'd told her he was expecting someone, in the hopes of increasing his chances of seating. “I'll send a waiter right over,” she said. “Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.” So benevolent was her smile that he tried to think of some small request to gratify her.

Still feeling expansive when the waiter arrived, he ordered a bottle of Champagne and scanned the room. While he recognized a couple of the patrons—a burly American novelist of the Montana school, the skinny lead singer of a Britpop band—he didn't see anyone he knew in the old-fashioned sense. Feeling awkward in his solitude, he studied the menu and wondered why he'd never brought Lydia to Paris. He regretted it now, for her sake as well as his own; the pleasures of travel were less real to him when they couldn't be verified by a witness. But he'd taken her for granted—that was part of the problem. Why did that always happen?

When he looked up, a young couple were standing at the edge of the room, searching the crowd. The woman was striking—a tall beauty of indeterminate race. They seemed disoriented, as if the brilliant party to which they'd been summoned had migrated elsewhere. The woman met his gaze—and smiled. Alex smiled back. She tugged on her companion's sleeve and nodded toward Alex's table.

Suddenly they were approaching.

“Do you mind if we join you for a moment?” the woman said. “We can't find our friends.” She didn't wait for the answer, taking the seat next to Alex, exposing, in the process, a length of unstockinged taupe-colored thigh.

“Frédéric,” the man said, extending his hand, seeming more self-conscious than his companion. “And this is Tasha.”

“Please, sit,” Alex said. Some instinct prevented him from giving his own name.

“What are
you
doing in Paris?” Tasha asked.

“Just, you know, getting away.”

The waiter arrived with the Champagne, and Alex requested two more glasses.

“I think we have some friends in common,” Tasha said. “Ethan and Olivier.”

Alex nodded noncommittally.

“I love New York,” Frédéric said.

“It's not what it used to be,” Tasha countered.

“I know what you mean.” Alex wanted to see where this was going.

“Still,” Frédéric said, “it's better than Paris.”

“Well,” Alex said, “yes and no.”

“Barcelona,” Frédéric said, “is the only hip city in Europe.”

“And Berlin,” said Tasha.

“Not anymore.”

“Do you know Paris well?” Tasha asked.

“Not really.”

“We should show you.”

“It's shit,” Frédéric said.

“There are some new places,” she said, “that aren't too boring.”

“Where are
you
from?” Alex asked the girl, trying to parse her exotic looks.

“I live in Paris,” she said.

“When she's not in New York.”

They drank the bottle of Champagne and ordered another. Alex was happy for the company. Moreover, he couldn't help liking himself as whomever they imagined him to be; that they'd mistaken him for someone else was tremendously liberating. And he was fascinated by Tasha, who was definitely flirting with him. More than once she grabbed his knee for emphasis, and at several points she scratched her left breast. An absent-minded gesture, or deliberately provocative? He tried to determine if her attachment to Frédéric was romantic, but the signs pointed in both directions. The Frenchman watched her closely, yet he didn't seem to resent her flirting. Then she happened to say, “Frédéric and I used to go out,” and the more Alex looked at her, the more enthralled he became. She was a perfect cocktail of racial features, familiar enough to answer an acculturated ideal and exotic enough to startle.

“You Americans are so puritanical,” she said. “All this fuss about your president getting a blow job.”

“It has nothing to do with sex,” Alex replied, conscious of a flush rising on his cheeks. “It's a right-wing coup.” Though he'd wanted to sound cool and jaded, somehow it came out defensive.

“Everything has to do with sex,” she said, staring into his eyes.

Thus provoked, the Veuve Clicquot tingling like a brilliant isotope in his veins, he ran his hand up the inside of her thigh, stopping only at the border of her tight short skirt. Holding his gaze, she opened her mouth with her tongue and moistened her lips.

“This is shit,” said Frédéric.

Although Alex was certain the other man couldn't see his hand, the subject of Frédéric's exclamation was worrisomely vague.

“You think everything is shit.”

“That's because it is.”

“You're an expert on shit.”

“There's no more art. Only shit.”

“Now that
that's
settled,” said Tasha.

A debate about dinner: Frédéric wanted to go to Buddha-Bar; Tasha wanted to stay. They compromised, ordering caviar and another bottle of Champagne. When the check arrived, Alex remembered at the last moment not to throw down his credit card. He decided, as a first step toward elucidating the mystery of his new identity, that he was the kind of guy who paid cash. While he counted out the bills, Frédéric gazed studiously into the distance with the air of a man practiced in the art of ignoring checks. Alex had a brief, irritated intuition that he was being used. Maybe this was a routine with them, pretending to recognize a stranger with a good table. But before he could develop this notion, Tasha had taken his arm and was leading him out into the night. The pressure of her arm, the scent of her skin—both were invigorating. He decided to see where this might take him. It wasn't as if he had anything else to do.

Frédéric's car, which was parked a few blocks away, didn't look operational; the front grille was bashed in, one of the headlights pointing up at a forty-five-degree angle. “Don't worry,” Tasha said. “Frédéric's an excellent driver. He only crashes when he feels like it.”

“How are you feeling
tonight?”
Alex asked.

“I feel like dancing,” he said. He began to sing Bowie's “Let's Dance,” drumming his hands on the steering wheel as Alex climbed into the back.

Les Bains Douches was half-empty. The only person they recognized was Bernard-Henri Lévy. Either they were too early or a couple years too late. The conversation had lapsed into French and Alex wasn't following everything. Tasha was all over him, stroking his arm and, intermittently, her own perfect left breast, and he was a little nervous about Frédéric's reaction. At one point there was a sharp exchange he didn't quite catch. Frédéric stood up and walked off.

“Look,” Alex said, “I don't want to cause any trouble.”

“No trouble,” she said.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“We used to go out. Now we're just friends.”

She pulled him forward and kissed him, slowly exploring the inside of his mouth with her tongue. Suddenly she leaned away and glanced up at a woman in a white leather jacket who was dancing beside an adjoining table.

“I think big tits are beautiful,” she said before kissing him with renewed ardor.

“I think
your
tits are beautiful,” he said.

“They are, actually,” she replied. “But not big.”

When Frédéric returned, his mood seemed to have lifted. He laid several bills on the table. “Let's go,” he said.

Alex hadn't been clubbing in several years. After he and Lydia moved in together, the clubs lost their appeal. Now he felt the return of the old thrill, the anticipation of the hunt—the sense that the night held secrets bound to be unveiled before it was over. Tasha was talking about someone in New York whom Alex was supposed to know. “The last time I saw him, he just kept banging his head against the wall, and I said to him, ‘Michael, you've really got to stop doing these drugs. It's been fifteen years now.’”

First stop was a ballroom in Montmartre. A band was onstage, playing an almost credible version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” While they waited at the bar, Frédéric played vigorous air guitar and shouted the refrain, “Here we are now / Entertain us.” After sucking down their cosmopolitans, they drifted out to the dance floor. The din was just loud enough to obviate the need for conversation.

The band launched into “Goddamn the Queers.” Tasha divided her attentions between the two of them, grinding her pelvis into Alex during a particularly bad rendition of “Champagne Supernova.” Closing his eyes and enveloping her with his arms, he lost track of his spatial coordinates. Were those her breasts in his hands, or the cheeks of her ass? When she flicked her tongue in his ear, he pictured a cobra rising from a wicker basket.

Then he opened his eyes and saw Frédéric conferring with another man and watching him from the edge of the dance floor.

Alex went off to find the men's room and another beer. When he returned, Tasha and Frédéric were slow-dancing to a French ballad and making out. He decided to cut his losses and leave. Whatever the game was, he suddenly felt too tired to play it. At that moment, Tasha looked across the room, waved, then slalomed toward him through the dancers, Frédéric following behind her.

“Let's go,” she shouted.

Out on the sidewalk, Frédéric turned obsequious. “Man, you must think Paris is total shit.”

“I'm having a good time,” Alex said. “Don't worry about it.”

“I do worry about it, man. It's a question of
honor.”

“I'm fine.”

“At least we could find some drugs,” said Tasha.

“The drugs in Paris are all shit.”

“I don't need drugs,” Alex said.

“‘Don't wanna get stoned,’” Frédéric sang. “‘But I don't wanna not get stoned.’”

They began arguing about the next destination. Tasha was making the case for a place called, apparently, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Frédéric insisted it wasn't open, instead pushing for L'Enfer. The debate continued in the car. Eventually they crossed the river and, later still, lurched to a stop beneath the Montparnasse tower.

The two doormen greeted his companions warmly. They descended the staircase into a space that seemed to glow with a purple light, the source of which Alex couldn't discern. A throbbing drum and bass riff washed over the dancers. Grabbing hold of the tip of his belt, Tasha led him toward a raised area above the dance floor, evidently a VIP area.