I won’t look Todd in the eye. “Sorry,” I mutter, “I can’t help.” I fiddle around with some equipment in the flatbed of my truck until I see him drive away. I still have work to do, but I make the executive decision to call it a day. I’m the boss, after all. I should know when it’s time to quit.
I drive to a bar that I’ve passed fifty times on my way to this job. It’s called Quasimodo’s and sports a bad paint job and metal grilles across the one window, which doubles as a lit Budweiser sign. In other words, it’s the sort of place nobody ever goes in the afternoon.
Sure enough, when I first walk inside and my eyes are adjusting to the light, I think it’s only me and the bartender. Then I notice a woman with bleached blond hair doing a crossword at the bar. Her arms are bare and ropy, with crepe paper skin; she looks strange and familiar all at once, like a T-shirt washed so often that the picture on the front is now just a blotch of color. “Irv,” she says, “what’s a five-letter loamy deposit?”
The bartender shrugs. “Something that calls for Imodium?”
She frowns. “TheNew York Timescrossword’s too classy for that.”
“Loess,” I say, climbing onto a stool.
“Less what?” she asks, turning to me.
“No,loess.L-O-E-S-S. It’s a kind of sediment made by layers of silt that the wind’s blown into ridges or dunes.” I point to her newspaper. “That’s your answer.”
She writes it in, in pen. “You happen to know six across? ‘London streetcars’?”
“Sorry.” I shake my head. “I don’t know trivia. Just a little geology.”
“What can I get you?” the bartender asks, setting a napkin in front of me.
I look at the row of bottles behind him. “Sprite,” I say.
He pours the soft drink from a hose beneath the bar and sets it in front of me. From the corner of my eye, I see the woman’s drink, a martini. My mouth actually starts to water.
There is a television above the bar. Oprah Winfrey is telling everyone about beauty secrets from around the world. Do I want to know how Japanese women keep their skin so smooth?
“You some kind of professor at Brown?” the woman asks.
I laugh. “Yeah,” I say. Why the hell not? I’m never going to see her again.
The truth is, I don’t even have a college degree. I flunked out of URI a hundred years ago, when I was a junior. Unlike Reid, the golden son, who’d graduated with honors and had gone on to work as a financial analyst at Bank of Boston before starting his own investment firm, I had majored in Beer Pong and grain alcohol. At first it was parties on the weekends, and then study breaks midweek, except I wasn’t doing any studying. There is an entire semester I cannot remember, and one morning, I woke up naked on the steps of the library without any recollection of what had led up to that.
When my dad wouldn’t let me move back home, I crashed on Reid’s couch in his Kenmore Square apartment. I got a job as a night watchman at a mall, but lost it when I kept missing work because I was sleeping off that afternoon’s bender. I started stealing cash from Reid so that I could buy bottles of cheap booze and hide them around the apartment. Then one morning, I woke up, hungover, to find a handgun pointed at my forehead.
“Reid! What the fuck?” I yelped, scrambling upright.
“If you’re trying to kill yourself, Max,” he said, “let’s speed it up a bit.”
Together we dumped all the alcohol down the sink. Reid took the day off work to come with me to my first AA meeting. That was seventeen years ago. By the time I met Zoe, when I was twenty-nine, I was sober and had figured out what a guy without a college degree could do with his life. Thinking back to the only classes I’d really liked in college—geology—I figured I’d better stick to the land. I got a small business loan and bought my first mower, painted the side of my truck, and printed up flyers. I may not be living the lush life, like Reid and Liddy, but I netted $23,000 last yearandI could still take days off to surf when the waves were good.
It was enough, with Zoe’s income, to rent a place—a place that she’s now living in. When you are the spouse that wants out of the relationship, you have to be willing to actuallyleave.Sometimes, even though it has been a whole month, I find myself wondering if she’s remembered to ask the landlord about getting the furnace cleaned. Or whether she’s signed a lease for another year, this time without my name on it. I wonder who carries her heavy drums up the entryway stairs now, or if she just leaves them in the car overnight.
I wonder if I made a mistake.
I look over at the crossword woman’s martini. “Hey,” I say to Irv the bartender, “can I get one of those?”
The woman taps the pen against the bar. “So you teach geology?”
On the television, Oprah is talking about how to make your own salt scrub, like the ones Cleopatra once used.
“No. Egyptian,” I lie.
“Like Indiana Jones?”
“Kind of,” I reply. “Except I’m not afraid of snakes.”
“Have you been there? On the Nile?”
