Townie_ A Memoir Part 17

"I asked him if he would've really used that. He said he'd just shoot in the air."

Like that would've stopped anyone. Like there was reason involved here. Like we would've all paused at the loud noise and cooled down right away and walked off in opposite directions because this had all gotten so obviously out of hand.

Pop was walking up the stairs. "Who wants a nightcap?" He was smiling widely, his cheeks flushed above his beard. His dog Luke followed him up to the lighted kitchen, and Pop opened the fridge and pulled out four bottles of beer. He twisted the cap off Theresa's first and walked over and handed it to her. She smiled up at him. "Put your gun away?"

"Yes, ma'am."

We all laughed, even me, and it occurred to me I'd gotten so brave in one way but had stayed so cowardly in another. When Pop handed me the bottle, I took it from him and then we four lifted our drinks to that dish best served cold, a revenge I knew I would never seek.

THE NEXT morning my father drove to Ma.s.s, and I had coffee with Peggy while she fed my baby sister. She was six months old and her name was Cadence and she had a shock of red hair that reminded me of the little bird Woodstock from Charlie Brown cartoons. After Peggy had burped and changed her, she asked if I wouldn't mind holding her so her mother could squeeze in some writing upstairs. "And your father should be back soon."

Cadence was lighter than a book of political theory, her entire bottom resting in my palm. She held her hands out from her sides but had a hard time holding her head up, so I fanned my fingers against the back of her tiny skull, smelled mashed pear and clean cotton and something I couldn't name. She was looking directly into my eyes, hers the color of a blue planet, her mouth open slightly, and how was it possible to be so young and small and utterly dependent on the love of the people you were born into, their constant care, their good judgment, for years and years?

I made patronizing baby sounds to make her smile, but she just kept looking into my eyes. It was as if she had me all figured out and wasn't quite sure she wanted to be held anymore by this man twenty-three years older than she was, her brother.

I was sitting with her at the dining room table when Pop came home. She'd fallen asleep against my shoulder. The sun shone across the floor and up the stairs where her mother was writing.

I heard Pop greet Luke downstairs, then he was walking up to where we were. He smiled right away. He was wearing the same corduroy shirt from the night before, that and a pair of jeans and black leather boots he'd ordered from a boot maker in Montreal. He'd gone to church to talk to Jesus. That's how he usually described prayer, as a personal conversation with Jesus Christ. This was something I had never done or even considered doing. Nor, as far as I knew, had my brother or sisters.

When Suzanne turned sixteen, she informed Pop she wasn't going to church anymore and it was like a sandbag fell away, and soon Jeb and Nicole and I were caught up in this lucky current that eventually meant we got to sleep late on Sundays too. But Pop kept going to Ma.s.s six or seven days a week, and now he was smiling at his second and fifth children. His beard was newly trimmed, his cheeks and throat shaved clean. He stopped smiling and started scratching Luke behind the ears.

"That was wrong last night."

"What was?"

"Bringing the gun. That was bad."

I nodded, my hand pressed to the warm spine of his sleeping daughter. Peggy came downstairs for more coffee then. She held an empty mug, a big one from which she drank cafe au lait, a habit she'd picked up during a semester in Paris, and there was a far-off look in her eyes that reminded me of Jeb whenever he used to come downstairs after hours of practicing his guitar. Pop glanced at her as she pa.s.sed. "Writing?"

"Yeah." She filled her cup with coffee and warm milk from a pan, said to me quietly, "You can give her to your dad. He'll lay her in her crib."

She walked back up the stairs to her desk, and I stood and Pop came over. With my palm against the back of his baby's head, I handed him my sleeping sister. I could smell his hair, the sweet wafer of the Eucharist on his breath, this thing he believed in so strongly and which got him to say things like he'd just did. It was good he had something like that. Maybe people needed something like that. Men in particular.

13.

LIZ HAD A crush on a guy named Joe Hurka. He was in my father's fiction writing cla.s.s with her, and whenever she talked about him, which was quite a lot, her eyes had more light in them, her skin more color, her hair more shine. She talked about how sensitive he was, how beautiful his writing, and that he even wrote songs and played the guitar. One day in cla.s.s Pop asked him to sing them all something, and Joe did, and now Liz's crush looked like outright love to me. I hated Joe.

And I didn't. All the weeks she pined for him, I never met him. Whenever she talked about something new he'd written or sung, the jealousy I felt was a hot stone in my abdomen, but it was of two parts: the obvious, and that it was possible to be a young man and know what you were supposed to do with your time on earth. This guy Joe seemed to have that, and as much as I wished for him to pack up his guitar and short stories and move away somewhere, there was also a gnawing sense that he was a better man than I was and that I should just stand aside and let what was happening happen.

One Sat.u.r.day before my weight workout with Sam, I walked into Liz's empty dorm room and saw a thin ma.n.u.script on her bed. The room smelled like shampoo, and she had probably just gotten dressed and was getting something to eat down in the dining hall. I sat on the mattress and picked up four or five stapled pages. It was a new story by Joe. My fingertips went numb. It was as if I'd found a love letter from him to her, an irrational thought, I knew. I turned the t.i.tle page over and began to read.

The words were simple, clear and concrete, and soon I was no longer aware I was reading sentences written by Joe; instead, I became the story's protagonist, a teenage boy working as a dishwasher in a diner in a small town like Haverhill. I knew these things from the details, the abandoned mill building on the other side of the alley, the flickering light of the streetlamp over the broken sidewalk, the cigarette smoke of the boy's boss behind the counter. It's two or three in the morning and the boy is mopping the floor when two middle-aged prost.i.tutes walk in from the cold. They're wearing too much makeup and not enough clothes and before they can even sit down the boy's boss yells at them to leave, yells that they're closed and he doesn't serve wh.o.r.es anyway. The women go without much of a fight, and the story ends with the boy mopping the floor, shaking his head and thinking, That's not right, that's just not right That's not right, that's just not right.

I laid the story back down on the bed. I sat there awhile. I wasn't thinking of Joe or Liz or me. I wasn't thinking at all. I was seeing that boy in that diner and even feeling feeling what it might be like to be him in that moment when the world pulled him up against his own conscience, though this word was not yet in my head. It was like hearing a good song on the radio, that place it puts you where you weren't before. Or the movies, how they did that, too. And now Joe's story. what it might be like to be him in that moment when the world pulled him up against his own conscience, though this word was not yet in my head. It was like hearing a good song on the radio, that place it puts you where you weren't before. Or the movies, how they did that, too. And now Joe's story.

I wanted to read another one. I wanted to read whatever he'd written. But I was running late for my workout with Sam, and as I left Liz's room and walked down the worn carpet of Academy Hall, dorm room doors open and ten different alb.u.ms playing on ten different record players, talk and laughter and a vacuum cleaner running somewhere, I felt more here, here, like water leaking from an ear you hadn't known was blocked, and then something warm and wet is on your skin and now you can hear. like water leaking from an ear you hadn't known was blocked, and then something warm and wet is on your skin and now you can hear.

THE GOLDEN Gloves were three weeks away. It was a weeknight, probably Wednesday, and all day long Jeb and Randy and I had hung Sheetrock in the rooms we'd built in the widow's house overlooking the water. The ceilings came first. The day before, we'd started nailing spruce strapping into the joists sixteen inches on center and while Jeb finished that, Randy and I were hauling sheets of plaster board off the truck and stacking them against a wall in each of the three rooms. By coffee break, all the Sheetrock was unloaded and Jeb had finished the strapping. He was faster with measurements and cuts and handling the screw gun, so it fell to Randy and me to do most of the grunt work. We'd squat and lift a full sheet, carry it under where it would go, then we'd count off, "One, two, lift, lift," and yank the sheet up from our sides and flat onto our heads, our fingertips on its smooth surface to keep it from buckling and cracking. We'd each step up onto a stool or lidded joint compound bucket, and together we'd press the four-foot-wide, twelve-foot-long sheet up against the ceiling strapping and there'd be the electric whine of the screw gun as Jeb went to work sinking black screws through plasterboard into spruce till we could let go and drop our arms and step down to do it again and again.

Now the day was over, and I was in my small apartment in Lynn pulling on sweats. The only light in my room was a bulb in the ceiling, stark and too bright, and outside the windows was blackness, a cold I was planning to run through on my way to the Boys' Club and Tony Pavone's boxing ring. My shoulders were fatigued from all the overhead work of the day, and it would be hard to keep my fists up, hard to throw punches. But I wouldn't allow this thought to stay in my head. Whatever good had come to me had come from my complete and utter disregard for my body's need for comfort. If I began to capitulate now, where would it end? In no time I'd be small and soft again, a boy who liked to read books and build tree forts with his brother. A boy easily stomped.

I pulled a second sweatshirt down over the first. For a moment or two I just stood there in my empty room. No posters or photographs on the walls. No desk or chair or couch or bed. Just my yoga mat on the floorboards under my sleeping bag, the two work boots stuffed into a pillowcase I called a pillow. Beside it was the stack of books I'd been laboring through all year, a composition binder I sometimes took notes in, the glossy brochure of the University of Wisconsin at Madison waiting for me in the fall. In the corner, propped up against the dusty baseboard, was the AAU number I would soon pin to my trunks in the Golden Gloves, and it was time to move, time to get moving.

But in the kitchen I stopped at the door. I watched myself let go of the k.n.o.b and turn and put a pan of water on the stove. I opened the flames under it all the way, then watched myself take an empty cup and drop a tea bag into it. I walked back to where I slept for the notebook and a pencil, and why did I set them on the small kitchen table? Why was I sitting there waiting for the water to boil for the tea when I should be running along an icy sidewalk in the night to train?

I began to feel too warm in my layered sweats, but I didn't move. I opened the notebook in front of me. The water began to bubble and I stood and poured it steaming into my cup, the tea bag jerking, then rising, and now I watched as I set the cup near the notebook and took my pencil and held it. What was I doing? And why? Why was I doing this?

For a short time or a long time, I stared at the page. I saw how consistently level the blue lines were from left to right, a quarter of an inch high, maybe five-sixteenths. I kept staring at them. Then a curtain lifted and I began to see a factory somewhere where these notebooks were made, men and women running big machines, cutting and printing and binding, and I saw a man like Randy working some press, his outlaw mustache, sweat in the corners of his eyes, then I was in the woods, woods I called Maine, the place Liz was from, and now a young woman who looked very much like her was half drunk on warm beer and was losing her virginity on the hood of a Pontiac. Then I was was her, feeling the metal hood under my skin, the jabs into me that hurt, then didn't but did. her, feeling the metal hood under my skin, the jabs into me that hurt, then didn't but did.

The boy she'd given herself to finished quickly, and it was as if I were a mist in the trees watching them sitting now in the front seat. They smoked cigarettes and neither of them spoke. A soft rain began to fall and the boy started the engine and put his car in gear and drove down the rutted road away from what they'd just done together. Away from me.

I put down my pencil. In front of me were just handwritten words, quite a few crossed out and replaced with others. I raised the cup of tea to my lips and blew on it, but it had cooled to the temperature of the room. Hadn't it just been steaming? How long had I been sitting here?

I blinked and looked around my tiny rented kitchen, saw things I'd never seen before: the stove leaning to the left, the handle of the fridge covered with dirty masking tape, the chipped paint of the window casing, a missing square of linoleum on the floor under the radiator.

I stood and closed the notebook. I picked up the pencil and set it on top like some kind of marker, a reminder to me of something important I shouldn't lose.

A FEW days later I was in the ring with someone new. He was my height with a bushy beard, a narrow chest and wide waist, his arms thin, his eyes cloudy above blotchy cheeks. He was too young to look like this, a drunk from one of the neighborhood barrooms, and as I stepped into the ring to spar him, I wondered why he was here.

Someone hit the bell and we tapped gloves. He kept his hands low like Bobby Schwartz, and I thought I'd just throw some jabs, that's all, and I threw one, a white canyon opening up in my head. My eyes cleared and there were the ropes wrapped in duct tape, the darkness on the other side where Tony Pavone said, "Good hook. But both a you, keep your hands up up."

I must've dropped my right. I must've dropped it when I threw the jab and opened myself up. It was the hardest I'd ever been hit in the ring, and I didn't want to get hit again. A thousand bees were hovering now, their wings beating dully, and we were moving clockwise, our eyes locked. His still looked cloudy to me, the whites not white, his gaze unfocused. What he'd just thrown was luck, right? Tony yelled at him to hold his hands up up, but he wasn't, so I stepped in and threw a right and a flower flamed up behind my eyes, the bees' wings hot and buzzing under my skin, and through a maroon haze, he was there again. I wished for headgear. I wanted to stop and ask him how he was getting to me so easily, what was I doing wrong? But a three-minute round was a three-minute round, and you didn't stop in the middle. You just didn't.

I tried to evade him with some footwork, something I was never too swift at. I planted my feet, jabbed, then began to move counterclockwise, a direction from which it was harder for me to throw a strong right. His eyes blinked and his right hand dropped and I shot a hook for his cheek, but a hammer smashed the bees into my skull where they kept drilling on their own and my eyes burned and I could hear a voice, one of the bees talking, its wings explaining something, Finish him off. Throw a combination Finish him off. Throw a combination. These words meant not for me, but for this man who looked like he was just getting started, this drunk who punched hard enough to kill somebody. And he was holding back, too. Each of his hooks had hurt me, and he had to have seen that, but he wasn't stepping in to end things. He wasn't doing what I'd learned to do, to hurt even more the one you've already hurt.

In the next two minutes he hit me six or seven more times. When the round ended, I thanked him for the session and ducked between the ropes and untied my gloves and unwrapped my hands. My fingers were clumsy and looked far away. Tony Pavone was saying something to me, his voice close, words of advice, it sounded like. Words I couldn't quite decipher.

The headache lasted ten days, a huge hand squeezing my temples between thumb and forefinger. At the edge of my vision was a green world that sometimes turned purple or brown, and whenever I read my tape measure I had to squint, the hand squeezing harder.

I WAS riding in the back of Peggy's Subaru. Pop was driving. We were pulling away from Kappy's liquor store with one of his buddies I didn't know well. He sat in the pa.s.senger side and had a beard as wild-looking as Fidel Castro's, and he kept talking about Romania and collective farming. It was a warm, gray afternoon. On both sides of Main Street the dirty s...o...b..nks had melted into slush, its runoff sluicing into the drains, some of them clogged with damp leaves, empty cans or cigarette packs, damp sections of newspaper.

Pop elbowed his friend. "My boy's a Golden Glove boxer."

"What're you, a middleweight?"

"Yeah, no."

"No? You're not a middleweight?"

"I am, but not what he said."

Pop's eyes caught mine in the rearview. He was waiting for me to continue, and I could see that whatever I'd say next would be all right, that he was just curious, that's all; this was the collateral gift of him having been a father who'd always lived somewhere else, one who had never been part of any decisions we made or did not make about our lives; he'd always been absent, and it made the next thing easy to say. "The Gloves were last week. I didn't go."

"How come?"

"I don't know..."

"What?"

I could've told him about the beating I'd taken in the ring. I could've told him about the headache that wouldn't go away, or how I'd begun to see my skull as a container for my brains, one that had been designed to protect them so why was I encouraging people to punch it as hard as they could? Weren't there other things I could learn to do?

"I think I should be doing something more creative."

I did not say artistic, though I was thinking that. I did not say I'd started to write a short story for the first time and that each night after work I looked forward to that tea and to that table, to my pencil I would sharpen with the U-knife from my carpentry ap.r.o.n, the lined notebook I was slowly filling with words and sentences and paragraphs. I did not tell him that just doing this left me feeling pleasantly empty of something after, something I normally would have brought into the ring or the weight room.

Pop said, "Interesting." And he downshifted and drove the three of us along Main Street. We were heading off to a Bradford College faculty party somewhere, a dinner with grown men and women like the man beside Pop, people who had Ph.D.'s and taught and wrote, people who danced and painted and sculpted. Pop's friend was talking about Romania again, and I was looking out the window at this place that had become my hometown, the street Rosie P. had lived on, her sweet smile and naked brown legs. Columbia Park and the house my mother had worked so hard to keep us in, the longest we'd ever been anywhere, the tree house in the back made from stolen lumber, the attic turret I'd exiled myself to, the sidewalk in front where Tommy J. had punched my brother in the face and called my mother a wh.o.r.e. There were the worn apartment stairs beside Pleasant Spa where early in the morning kids from the avenues still waited for the bus and pa.s.sed joints and drank Pepsis or c.o.kes. And Cleary's side street, his loving drunk mother.

Pop's friend was talking about Miles Davis now and we were driving through Monument Square, a new restaurant where I had nearly beaten a boy to death. My father was driving and he could keep driving. Then we were on the Basilere Bridge over the Merrimack River, and as I watched the dark water flow east past the concrete floodwall and Captain Chris's Restaurant and the boxboard factory on the opposite bank, there was this recognition of movement, that like the currents below I was being pulled from what I had known to what I did not yet know, that for now I was suspended between two worlds.

IN MAY I finished writing a short story. It was set in Louisiana and was about a young man caring for his ailing grandmother. Every afternoon the grandmother's elderly friend brings fresh blackberries she's picked and the grandson takes them and puts them with the rest, but he's getting tired of baking blackberry cobbler and blackberry pie and blackberry bread and m.u.f.fins, and he's about to throw them all out when one afternoon, as he's getting ready to serve the women coffee, he overhears the friend crying and telling his grandmother how unhappy she is because she lives with her son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren in their small house and she doesn't want to be a burden, doesn't want to be any trouble, and that's why she leaves the house every day with her empty coffee can to pick blackberries. But now the season's over, she weeps, and she doesn't know what to do with herself anymore. In the final scene, the grandson decides to keep all the blackberries she's picked, and he bakes for days.

It was an overwritten, sentimental story, something I wouldn't know till months had pa.s.sed after finishing it. But as I wrote that last line my heart was thumping against my sternum and my mouth was dry and I felt pulled along by something larger than I was, something not in me but in this story that had come out of me.

It was a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, warm enough I didn't need a jacket. I grabbed my workout clothes and left my apartment. The inside of my car smelled like sawdust and the leather of my carpentry ap.r.o.n on the backseat. For a few miles the day was too bright and real and I blinked at it from the dream I'd cast myself in with the two old ladies and the young man and all those blackberries. Then I was on the back roads heading west. Instead of playing the radio, hunting for that one good song, I drove along in silence. On both sides of the road were woods, but today, for the first time, I saw them as individual trees, each one different from the one beside it or in front of it or behind it. One was as bent with age and weight as an old man, another as thin and straight as a young girl, one pine, the other maple or elm or oak, and the sun seemed to shine on each sprouting leaf, on each needle, on the black telephone lines sweeping from pole to pole, on the veined creosote at their bases, on each pebble at the side of the road, each broken piece of asphalt, each diamond of broken gla.s.s from a smashed bottle or cracked mirror or discarded compact from a woman I would never meet. And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing-even writing badly-had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me me, I would have to keep writing.

SOMETIME LATER I gave Pop and Peggy a copy of my story, "Blackberries." Pop read it first, then Peggy. She said, "Writing's hard, isn't it?"

I nodded.

Pop said the story started to make him feel something. Then he said, "I had a hunch you were going to do this."

"What?"

"Write."

"I didn't."

"I know, but I did."

I nodded again. There was a change in the air, a shift in winds, and I wasn't sure any of this was a good thing.

"You should tend bar."

"Why?"

"It's a great job for a writer. You can write in the morning and work at night."

But I wasn't a writer. He was a writer. I didn't want to be a writer. I just knew I had to write write.

"It's a good job for a graduate student, too. You'll need some pocket money working on that Ph.D."

It was strange to hear him offering such fatherly advice, but I knew he was right and I took it.

That summer he paid my way to the American Academy of Bartending in South Boston. It was in the same neighborhoods where my sister was raped, but I felt at home among the row houses and tin-sided apartment buildings, the overflowing dumpster beside the pool hall across from the barroom and sub shop and gas station where a black man in a greasy winter coat stood all day under the sun beside the shopping cart that held his life.

The bartending school was on the second floor above an Italian grocery and an Irish pub. It was a long damp room, and it held four bars the students were supposed to practice on. The carpet was a flattened orange s.h.a.g, the walls fake white paneling between smudged windows looking out over the street. The instructor was from the same generation as Tony Pavone. He had a thick Dorchester accent and wore gla.s.ses with black frames, his graying hair combed back with Vitalis. During cla.s.s, he wore a white shirt and a black bow tie and vest, its worn hem rubbing along the belt of his pants as he talked with his hands. He was from a time and place I knew nothing about, and over the next few days he taught five or six of us how to mix martinis and Manhattans, Brandy Alexanders, sidecars, and Rob Roys. He taught us how to open bottles of wine and how to pull a draft off the tap. He suggested we keep a lighter in our pocket in case a customer wanted to smoke, and he gave us a lecture on doing things right. Especially when it came to watching the till.

"You people are the money handlers for the whole operation, you understand? So be honest and don't tell no jokes when you're makin' change, all right?"

He made me think of resorts and casinos, all-night joints where Cadillac convertibles were parked under palm trees in a soft blue light. He made me think vaguely of organized crime.

At the end of the week I had my certificate proclaiming me a successful graduate of the American Academy of Bartending. That same week Trevor D. handed me my last check. We were standing in the sunlit yard of the widow's small home, larger now, something I'd always wondered about, this need of hers to expand when her life had gotten smaller and simpler, so why enlarge a house for only one?

"No jobs coming up, mate. I'll try to keep your brother working, but you don't have a kid so good luck to you." He shook my hand, his larger and more callused. I thanked him for all I'd begun to learn and drove away, the sun still high above the telephone lines and rooftops and trees. I'd started another story, this one set in New Hampshire and told from the point of view of a teenage girl whose family was moving when she didn't want to. She smoked a lot, often late at night among packed boxes in the dark living room, her family asleep upstairs. In the last writing session, she was drawing deeply on her Kool, its tip a bright ember she was thinking of putting to dry cardboard.

Rent was due and there was only a month left before I was to drive west for studies I was no longer pulled toward, so I left my apartment in Lynn and moved in with Pop, Peggy, Cadence, and Nicole. He gave me the spare room on the first floor, the same one he and I had broken into when he lived here with his second wife, Lorraine leaning against the doorframe in her nightgown, smoking, waiting for us. Except for those two weeks between women when he'd stayed with us on Columbia Park and slept in my room, I hadn't lived in the same s.p.a.ce with him since I was a boy in the woods of New Hampshire. It was strange to share a house with him; I felt like some hovering ghost of the boy I had been.

Soon enough I owned a black vest and bow tie, a white shirt and black nylon pants and black shoes, all of which I'd bought in pieces in strip malls. I'd gotten a bartending job working for a small catering company who did private parties for people wealthy enough to cater parties. They were in Boston in neighborhoods where surgeons and bankers and corporate executives lived. Except for some of the bigger houses in Bradford, I had never even seen homes this big and comfortable. They were on wide quiet streets, the unbroken sidewalks shaded by maples and oaks, and many of the houses were behind tall walls of stone and thick green hedges ten feet high. Some had security gates, and my boss-a funny and warm man going bald at thirty-five who referred to himself as a bis.e.xual Jew-would get out of the van and announce us into an intercom. A metal gate would slide open and we'd be directed to a service area, the place where I learned the cleaning people parked, the cook or nanny, the pool men, the gardener, and any tradesmen who'd come to work on the house.

It was a dry August and many of the parties were outside under cream-colored tents. We'd carry our bins of food and bags of ice and kegs of beer and cases of wine and liquor out to lawns that usually held a clay tennis court, a pool and pool house, a lush rose garden alongside hedges like those hiding the walls from the street. There would be tables set up under white linens, votive candles floating in gla.s.s bowls of water. I'd set up my bar in a corner of the tent or up on a veranda, and while I cut limes into wedges, as I emptied jars of olives and pearl onions and maraschino cherries into their respective dishes, as I cored lemons and sliced the skins into twists, I took in how the owners were usually polite enough but spoke to us all in the clipped and patronizing tones reserved for children or the mentally impaired. It was the same tone I would hear from owners on construction sites, the surprise the widow had shown when Jeb first saw her piano and mentioned he was a cla.s.sical guitarist. She smiled and looked him up and down, his carpenter's ap.r.o.n and framing hammer hanging against paint-splattered jeans with the hole in one knee, his scuffed work boots, the two days of whiskers on his cheeks and chin. She clearly did not believe him, something which didn't seem to bother him the way it was bothering me, and I was glad he began to describe the piece he was teaching himself, something by J. S. Bach, and he was going on long enough about it her face began to soften, and a light came into her eyes that looked less like revelation and more like guilt.

At one function, I had set up my bar in a high-ceilinged room. There was gleaming furniture laid out on Oriental carpets, and the walls were a raised-panel oak I was admiring, waiting for the party to begin, when a woman five or six years older than I came up to the bar and stared at me. She was lovely, her blonde hair pulled up in a twist, her clavicle tanned above a black c.o.c.ktail dress. She said, "Aren't you Andre Dubus's son?"

"Yeah, how'd you know that?"

"I work at G.o.dine, your father's publisher."

I did not remember meeting her or any of Pop's publishers, but a summer before there'd been a cookout at Pop's house, a few people there from Boston. Maybe it was then. An older man stepped up beside her. He was tall and wore a double-breasted blue suit, the room filling with guests behind him. She smiled up at him and was about to say something, but he put his hand on her elbow and ordered from me a Glenfiddich on the rocks.