I Knew You'd Be Lovely Read online

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you wanted,” he said.

  Gail didn’t yell at him for waking her up. She didn’t say: “Oh, God, Bradley,” or “Are you drunk?” She wasn’t dramatic like that; it wasn’t her style. That was one of the things he’d loved best about her.

  “What is it you think I wanted, Bee?” she said. She hadn’t used his nickname in a long while; it hurt to hear it. Bradley closed his eyes. Of all the people in the world, Gail had probably understood him best.

  “I wanted you, that’s all,” she said.

  He could barely keep his thoughts straight, but he knew it had all gone wrong somehow. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I feel lost in this world,” he whispered.

  Gail was silent for a moment. “It isn’t altogether impossible, you know.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “To trust people.” Her voice sounded surprisingly calm, even beautiful. For one wild instant, he thought about asking: Is it too late for us? But he knew it was.

  He was nodding in the half-light, but of course Gail couldn’t see him. He thought he heard a man’s voice in the background, and her muffled reply: “It’s Bradley.” His breath came out in small white bursts. There was one more thing.

  “Are you happy?” he said.

  There was a pause. “Yes,” she said, and he knew it was the truth. He felt both pained and relieved.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “You deserve it.”

  “Bradley!” a voice bellowed from the direction of the food. It was Oscar, with a blonde under one arm and a redhead under the other. He kissed Bradley on both cheeks. “I can’t believe you showed up! You are my favorite person in the whole world!” He seemed even more drunk than Bradley, which was saying something. “Are you just getting here?” he said, and Bradley knew he would have to find a way to break it to him that he was wearing his coat because he was on his way out. “Why in God’s name don’t you have a drink? Here.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Ouzo and Sprite,” Oscar said. “Drink it.” He began introducing the girls. “These are Cricket”—he put his hand on the back of the blonde—“and Jackie.” He patted the redhead.

  “Hiya,” said Jackie.

  “Hello,” said Cricket.

  Oscar released them, pulled an arm around Bradley’s shoulders, and nodded in the direction of a pregnant woman. “Have I ever told you I think women are like flowers and pregnant women are like fruit?”

  Jackie whacked him on the arm with the backside of her hand.

  “What?” he said. “What’s wrong with that? There’s nothing offensive about that!”

  “There most certainly is,” Jackie said.

  “Hey, you’re Laryngitis Girl!” Cricket said, spotting the clipboard. A second later, Samantha had joined the group. “I heard someone talking about you when I first came in, but I thought they made it up. I thought you were a party myth!”

  Samantha slowly shook her head. Nope, I’m real, she seemed to be saying.

  Oscar extended his hand. “I am Oscar, lovely lady. And this fine fellow is my dear friend Bradley—”

  “We’ve met,” Bradley said. “We were talking for a while. Before.” Samantha handed him her clipboard.

  Were you planning on leaving without saying good-bye?

  “Of course not. I was about to go looking for you,” he said. From her face he could tell she knew he was lying. He took a sip of the ouzo and Sprite; it tasted dreadful.

  Jackie was observing them. “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if you two became fast friends, only then her voice came back, and you couldn’t stand the sound of it?” she said, apparently very excited by the idea. Bradley and Samantha stood motionless. Oscar pressed his lips together.

  “I don’t mean timelessly funny,” she said. “Just, you know, funny in a Seinfeldian sort of way.”

  “Wasn’t there a princess in some fairy tale who had to give up her voice to save the thing she loved?” Cricket said.

  “Like what—a prince?” said Jackie. Oscar laughed, and Cricket shrugged. Samantha began to write.

  Who were you talking to out there?

  “My wife,” Bradley said. “I mean, my ex-wife.” God. “Listen, things are over between my wife and me. They have been for a long time.”

  You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Samantha wrote, but he noticed she wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  Cricket craned her neck to see the clipboard. “Can I buy a vowel? Can I buy a vowel?” she said, and Bradley’s head began to throb. Had he eaten anything today, other than pickles?

  Jackie snapped her fingers. “Listen up,” she said, addressing the group. “See if you can come up with the word that makes use of all the vowels—in their proper order.”

  Oscar took off his glasses and began cleaning them with his handkerchief.

  “Including Y?” Cricket asked.

  “Including Y,” Jackie said, taking a hearty gulp from her drink.

  Bradley handed the ouzo and Sprite back to Oscar. It now felt as if tiny elves were constructing an aquarium inside his skull. “Have you by chance got any aspirin?” he asked Samantha, trying to summon a smile.

  Sorry. Guess I’m not much of a doctor. She looked him in the eye for the first time. You OK?

  “I’ve got a bit of a headache,” he said, wishing he could tell her everything—that she was the first woman he’d been attracted to since his wife, that the reason he’d moved to the States was so he could officially become a foreigner, since he’d felt like one his whole life.

  “Give us a clue,” Oscar said to Jackie. He loved riddles and did the Times crossword religiously.

  “There are no clues,” Jackie said. Cricket made a frown with puckered lips. “Okay, fine. It begins with the letter F. And that’s just because I like you guys.”

  “Faeoli,” Oscar said.

  “Not a word!” said Jackie. “And don’t try to get funny with me.”

  Oscar turned to Bradley. “You all right there, buddy? You’re not looking so hot.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Bradley said, but then felt his stomach fluids reverse direction, as if in a gastrointestinal Coriolis effect.

  “Facetiously,” Jackie announced, and Oscar cursed. Bradley scanned the room to see where a bathroom might be.

  “Hey, it’s almost midnight!” Cricket said. Instinctively Bradley turned toward Samantha. She was gone again.

  “Where’d she go?” he said, grabbing Oscar by the shoulders. “That girl who was just here.”

  “I saw her putting her coat on in a hurry. I think her pager went off or something.”

  So he’d lost her for real this time. The room began to spin. “I’ve got a terrific headache,” he said.

  “Wow,” Cricket said. “Did you know those were FDR’s last words?”

  Not at all relieved by this information, Bradley felt as if he were about to vomit. “Where’s the bathroom?” he asked, concentrating on the floor.

  “Over by the kitchen, where you first came in,” said Jackie.

  When he got there, he found a heartbreaking queue. “Ten, nine, eight,” the crowd began to chant. Bradley pushed his way to the front, hoping they’d be too festive to notice. “Seven, six, five.” This is a medical emergency, he was prepared to offer, if anyone objected. “Four, three, two.” He saw the door open, shoved past the person who was leaving—“One”—and barely had time to turn the lock before dropping to his knees. “Happy New Year!” the crowd cheered, as Bradley retched.

  He lay on the floor for what seemed like a long time, blurry and exhausted, his thoughts weaving everywhere. Can I buy a vowel? Can I buy a vowel? On the other side of the door, the sound of popping corks punctuated the flow of songs and laughter. He was spending the first moments of a newborn year in the fetal position on the floor of a stranger’s bathroom. He breathed in the cold, lonely smell of tile and tried to imagine what he might
have said or done differently. He remembered something he’d been taught as a child: that in the end, we’ll be judged by our dreams as well as our accomplishments, by all that went unspoken as well as what was said. But even as a Catholic schoolboy, he’d rejected the idea as both sentimental and unlikely. And now, with an acrid taste still fresh in his mouth, he rejected it anew. Sometimes things simply didn’t work out. Wasn’t that just the way of the world? Sometimes you try and try until your heart might break, and still your shot at heaven slips away.

  Someone was pounding on the door. Bradley didn’t care. He remained on the floor, staring at a loofah sponge and some pink bath-oil beads that must have belonged to Kiki.

  “What’s going on in there?” a man’s voice shouted, and then swiftly, silently, a piece of paper slid under the door.

  I have something for you.

  Bradley rose and undid the lock, and there, at the front of the crowd, stood Samantha, with her coat still on. She held out her hand and smiled. In it was a bottle of aspirin.

  He wanted to speak but couldn’t. How does one begin? he wanted to ask her. How does anyone ever begin? Samantha’s body seemed to answer for her: She took his hand and led him down the hallway, into the elevator, and out the front door.

  After the crowded noise of the party, the stillness of the street came as a shock. The snow had stopped falling, and everything—from the trash receptacles to the parked cars to the streetlamps—had been transformed into a fresh version of itself. It was beautiful; it was like waking up into a snowman’s dream of Earth.

  Samantha slipped her arm through his, and the two began to walk. “Where to?” he said. She leaned in and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. So the pair continued, arm in arm, with no clue where they were going, and no idea what they were in for. But in a way, it didn’t seem to matter, and for many city blocks, neither one of them said a word.

  THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH

  The camping trip was Fetterman’s idea. Carla had reached the end of her rope months ago and had been looking into one of those hard-core rebellious-teen boot camps, where the unspoken motto seemed to be that you have to be broken before you can be fixed. But then there was a death at the very camp they’d researched: A boy named Martin Lee Anderson—who was also fifteen and even looked a little like Derek—had died after collapsing during a march and then being kicked in the abdomen by one of the counselors. There was a lawsuit, and a 20/20 exposé, and it quickly became clear to both Fetterman and Carla that perhaps tough love was not the answer.

  Out of desperation, and maybe a little out of self-loathing, Fetterman decided to confide his child-rearing woes to his ex-wife, a psychoanalyst still living and practicing in their old colonial in Wellesley, Massachusetts. It needled him to think of her in that house. They’d bought it as a fixer-upper, then spent the next seven years accosted by constant noise, clutter, and inconvenience. And dust—at one point they discovered sawdust even in the empty ice-cube trays in the freezer. By the time the renovations were complete, the marriage had fallen apart. Sonya offered to split the house—let him have the upstairs and she’d keep the downstairs, and her practice—but this seemed the sort of arrangement that kept psychoanalysts in business, and Fetterman didn’t bite. Instead he packed his bags and moved to Arizona.

  Sonya was a highly respected therapist who’d first become interested in the field when her college roommate told her she gave exquisite advice. She had a way of making her patients feel she was always on their side, deep down, even if she disagreed with them on the surface. Which had made it all the more objectionable to Fetterman that it felt as if she were secretly against him, waiting for him to screw up—and now he finally had, as predicted. Telling her that things had gone from bad to unbearable with Derek, that they’d lost control of him, that they’d even considered one of those boot camps, was as close to self-flagellation as he had ever come. No wonder he could only bear to do it via e-mail. His ex-wife meted out her disapproval succinctly: “When you correct others don’t humiliate them. Show them new tenderness; then they will humble themselves.” At first Fetterman had dismissed such lofty naïveté—and from a woman with no children of her own—but in short order began to accuse himself of a possible failure of imagination. A few days later, racking his brain for ways to try “new tenderness,” he’d conceived of the camping trip.

  Fetterman worked in tech support and had never been on a camping trip, but it seemed the sort of excursion on which a father and son might reconnect. In his old life, he might even have imagined a touching lesson imparted while fishing, or a tender explanation of the constellations in the night sky, or a reconciliation after a near-death experience—perhaps a bear attack, or an unsuccessful river fording. In his old life, that is, before he’d had to apologize to the neighbor whose cat Derek lit on fire, before he’d had to explain to a third-grade teacher that there was no way his son had access to actual anthrax. Before his understanding of the world and its inhabitants had been completely transformed.

  Fetterman saw no reason to let a simple lack of experience stand in his way. On his lunch hour he drove to the bookstore in the strip mall down the road from his office and picked up Wilderness Camping & Hiking: The Ultimate Outdoors Book. The store was out of Camping for Dummies, which was fine by Fetterman; one of his overachiever classmates had patented the franchise, and Fetterman would sooner have been bastinadoed (Medieval Torture for Dummies) than add to that guy’s profit stream.

  He sat on a footstool and flipped through the pages, stopping at a diagram that showed how to use your jeans as a backpack by roping the waist and bringing the legs up over your shoulders as straps. The chapter featured all kinds of ingenious solutions to unlikely scenarios; “In Case of Emergency,” it was called. Fetterman closed the book, thinking: Isn’t life just one big, long emergency, happening very, very slowly? He bought a carrot muffin and an iced coffee and browsed the rest of the store, skipping the comic book section, of course. The only other book he considered buying was a memoir showcased among the new releases. It was written in the form of a letter from a mother to her runaway teenage daughter. On the back, a savvy blurb read: “Every fifteen-year-old is a runaway, whether she runs away or not.” Fetterman returned the volume to the shelf. Best not to give the boy any new ideas.

  Fetterman and Derek had been in the car for an hour and a half. Derek had yet to speak. He sat in the backseat, surly in his headphones, practically a caricature of teen angst. If Fetterman hadn’t put away his pencils for good, he might have been inspired to try to capture the embattled disinterest on his son’s features. He stole furtive glances in the rearview mirror: Derek had no nose piercings, no Mohawk, no black eyeliner, no trench coat. His face was so nakedly defiant, it was as if he didn’t need the props.

  It was not an unattractive face. As an infant, Derek had been the most beautiful baby. Everyone remarked on it. And so placid; he seemed to possess an otherworldly calm. “That boy is a Rembrandt cherub!” said a barista with horn-rimmed glasses the first Saturday Fetterman and Carla took him out into the world. That Derek had been such a well-behaved, delightful baby was one of the most painful ironies of their current situation. Carla had once gazed into his eyes the way a woman who has lived her whole life in the mountains would gaze at the sea. Now she’d started taking five milligrams of Valium every morning, and still it didn’t stop her hands from shaking.

  “Jesus!” said Fetterman, swerving just in time. A deer was standing in the middle of the road. In the backseat, Derek remained unfazed. They rounded a curve and passed a deer warning sign. “Little late now,” Fetterman muttered. He’d always thought deer warning signs had a lot more artistry than other road signs; the deer were rendered in much greater detail than humans. Derek took off his headphones, and Fetterman seized the opportunity to ask him a question. “Do you know why deer graze so close to the road?” he said, regretting that his earnest attempt at conversation sounded like the setup to a joke. Derek ignored him, made a minute techni
cal adjustment, and put the headphones back on. Fetterman answered anyway. “Because the grass is saltiest there, especially in winter,” he said, a fact he’d learned in his defensive driving course. “It’s the foie gras of grass.” He could hear the metallic screed of what sounded like a symphony of Bessemer converters. There were still two hours to go before they reached Lockett Meadow, and he suspected they would spend it in silence.

  By the time they passed the first sign for Flagstaff, Fetterman was already wondering if the trip was a mistake. He hated outdoor activities and tried to avoid them as much as possible. Once, when he and Sonya were first courting, she’d invited him on a ski getaway with two other couples. Fetterman had pointed out that skiing combined three things he loathed—extreme cold, extreme height, and extreme speed—but agreed to go anyway. He spent the majority of the weekend in a foul mood, watching stand-up comics on HBO while Sonya and her friends donned Thinsulate and tested the strength of their anterior cruciate ligaments. He figured he had only himself to blame: He should have said no. Bad things happened when you followed the crowd. Maybe he would say that to Derek at some point over the weekend, tell him that he agreed in principle with wanting to strike out on your own, rebel against everything, find your drummer, but it was possible to do so in a less destructive way. In his head, he searched for phrases that wouldn’t sound pedantic and square. Then he tried to imagine what would have happened if his own father had ever said such a thing to him.

  Fetterman had been a wayward teenager himself—Who wasn’t? he liked to ask, when telling stories of his youth—and had never really connected with his father, who worked in radio and died shortly after Fetterman went to college. In fact, the closest he’d felt to him was an experience that took place when his father was absent. It happened on an afternoon in the summer of 1977, when Fetterman was seventeen. He’d just had a blowout fight with his girlfriend and had gone for a long walk on the jetty in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He thought he was alone, but then he spotted an old man fishing by himself at the end of the pier. The old-timer had a radio with him, and when Fetterman approached, he looked up at him with watery blue eyes. “Elvis is dead,” he said. Fetterman’s first instinct was to run home and tell his father the news. His father had worshipped Elvis, had gotten his first job in radio in the 1950s after seeing Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show. But by the time he got home, Fetterman realized, his father would already know. If he didn’t know now. He looked at the old man sitting alone, and suddenly he understood: His father did know; he could feel it. “Elvis is dead, Pop,” he said, staring across the wide, churning surface of the ocean. His father died of a heart attack the following year.