Henry wakes to the blare of morning traffic.
He winces at the sound of car horns, the sunlight streaming through the window. He reaches for the memories of last night, and for a second, comes up with nothing, a flat black slate, a cottony silence. But when he squeezes his eyes shut, the darkness cracks, gives way to a wave of pain and sadness, a medley of broken bottles and heavy rain, and a stranger in a black suit, a conversation that must have been a dream.
Henry knows that Tabitha said no—that part was real, the memory too stinging to be anything but true. That is, after all, why he started drinking. The drinking is what led him home through the rain, to rest on the stoop before going inside, and that is where the stranger—but no, that part didn’t happen.
The stranger and their conversation, that was the stuff of stories, a clear subconscious commentary, his demons played out in mental desperation.
A headache thuds dully in Henry’s skull, and he scrubs at his eyes with the back of one hand. A metal weight knocks against his cheek. He squints up and sees a dark leather band around his wrist. An elegant analog watch, with gold numerals set against an onyx ground. On its face, a single golden hand rests the barest fraction off of midnight.
Henry has never worn a watch.
The sight of it, heavy and unfamiliar on his wrist, reminds Henry of a shackle. He sits up, clawing at the clasp, consumed by the sudden fear that it is bound to him, that it won’t come off—but at the slightest pressure, the clasp comes free, and the watch tumbles onto the twisted duvet.
It lands facedown, and there, on the reverse, Henry sees two words etched in hairline script.
Live well.
He scrambles out of the bed, away from the watch, stares at the timepiece as if expecting it to attack. But it just lies there, silent. His heart knocks inside his chest, so loud he can hear it, and he is back in the dark, rain dripping through his hair as the stranger smiles and holds out his hand.
Deal.
But that didn’t happen.
Henry looks at his palm and sees the shallow cuts, crusted over with blood. Notices the drops of brownish red dotting the sheets. The broken bottle. That was real, then, too. But the devil’s hand in his, that was a fever dream. Pain can do that, creep from waking hours into sleep. Once, when he was nine or ten, Henry had strep throat, the pain so bad that every time he drifted off to sleep, he dreamed of swallowing hot coals, of being trapped in burning buildings, the smoke clawing down his throat. The mind, trying to make sense of suffering.
But the watch—
Henry can hear a low, rhythmic knocking as he holds it to his ear. It doesn’t make any other sound (one night, soon, he will take the thing apart, and find the body empty of cogs, empty of anything to explain the creeping forward motion).
And yet, it is solid, heavy even, in his hand. It feels real.
The knocking gets louder, and then he realizes it’s not coming from the watch at all. It’s just the solid thud of knuckles on wood, someone at his door. Henry holds his breath, waits to see if it will stop, but it doesn’t. He backs away from the watch, the bed, grabs a clean shirt from the back of a chair.
“I’m coming,” he mutters, dragging it over his head. The collar snags on his glasses, and he catches his shoulder on the doorframe, swearing softly, hoping all the way from the bedroom to the front door that the person beyond will give up, go away. They don’t, so Henry opens the door, expecting to see Bea or Robbie or maybe Helen down the hall, looking again for her cat.
But it’s his sister, Muriel.
Muriel, who has been to Henry’s place exactly twice in the last five years. And once it was because she had too much herbal tea at a lunch meeting and couldn’t make it back to Chelsea.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, but she is already brushing past him, unwinding a scarf that’s more decorative than functional.
“Does family need a reason?” The question is clearly rhetorical.
She turns, her eyes sweeping over him, the way he imagines they sweep over exhibits, and he waits for her usual assessment, some variation of you look like shit.
Instead his sister says, “You’re looking good,” which is strange, because Muriel has never been one to lie (she “doesn’t like to encourage fallacy in a world rife with empty speech”) and a passing glance in the hall mirror is enough to confirm that Henry does, in fact, look almost as rough as he feels. “Beatrice texted me last night when you didn’t answer your phone,” she continues. “She told me about Tabitha, and the whole no-go. I’m sorry, Hen.” Muriel hugs him, and Henry doesn’t know where to put his hands.
They end up hovering in the air around her shoulders until she lets go. “What happened? Was she cheating?” And Henry wishes the answer
were yes, because the truth is worse, the truth is that he simply wasn’t interesting enough. “It doesn’t matter,” continues Muriel. “Fuck her, you deserve better.”
He almost laughs, because he can’t count how many times Muriel pointed out that Tabitha was out of his league.
She glances around at the apartment.
“Did you redecorate? It’s really cozy in here.”
Henry surveys the living room, dotted with candles and art and other remnants of Tabitha. The clutter is his. The style was hers. “No.”
His sister is still standing. Muriel never sits, never settles, never even perches.
“Well, I can see you’re fine,” she says, “but next time, answer your phone. Oh,” she adds, taking her scarf back, already halfway to the door. “Happy New Year.”
It takes him a moment to remember. Rosh Hashanah.
Muriel sees the confusion on his face and grins. “You would have made such a bad rabbi.”
He doesn’t disagree. Henry would normally go home—they both would
—but David couldn’t get away from his hospital shift this year, so their parents had made other plans.
“Are you going to temple?” he asks now.
“No,” says Muriel. “But there’s a show uptown tonight, a kinky burlesque hybrid, and I’m pretty sure there’s going to be some fire play. I’ll light a candle on someone.”
“Mom and Dad would be so proud,” he says dryly, but in truth, he suspects they would. Muriel Strauss can do no wrong.
She shrugs. “We all celebrate in our own way.” She twists the scarf back into place with a flourish. “I’ll see you for Yom Kippur.”
Muriel reaches for the door, then turns back toward him, and stretches up to ruffle Henry’s hair. “My little storm cloud,” she says. “Don’t let it get too dark in there.”
And then she’s gone, and Henry sags back against the door, dazed, tired, and thoroughly confused.
 |
Henry has heard that grief has stages.
He wonders if the same is true for love.
If it’s normal to feel lost, and angry, and sad, hollow and somehow, horribly, relieved. Maybe it’s the thud of the hangover muddling all the things he should be feeling, churning them into what he does.
He stops at Roast, the bustling coffee shop a block shy of the store. It has good muffins, halfway decent drinks, and terrible service, which is pretty much par for the course in this part of Brooklyn, and sees Vanessa working at the till.
New York is full of beautiful people, actors and models moonlighting as bartenders and baristas, making drinks to cover rent until their first big break. He’s always assumed Vanessa is one of those, a waifish blonde with a small infinity symbol tattooed inside one wrist. He also assumes her name is Vanessa—that’s the name on the tag pinned to her apron—but she’s never
actually told him. Has never said anything to him, for that matter, besides, “What can I get you?”
Henry will stand at the counter, and she will ask his order and his name (even though he has been coming here six days a week for the last three years, and she’s been there for two of them), and from the time she punches in his flat white to the time she writes his name on the cup and calls out for the next order, she will never look at him. Her gaze will flit from his shirt to the computer to his chin, and Henry will feel like he isn’t even there.
That’s how it always goes. Only, today, it doesn’t.
Today, when she takes his order, she looks up.
It’s such a small change, the difference of two inches, maybe three, but now he can see her eyes, which are a startling blue, and the barista looks at him, not his chin. She holds his gaze, and smiles.
“Hi there,” she says, “what can I get you?”
He orders a flat white, and says his name, and that is where it ends. Then it doesn’t.
“Fun day planned?” she asks, making small talk as she writes his name on the cup.
Vanessa has never made small talk with him before.
“Just work,” he says, and her attention flicks back to his face. This time he catches a faint shimmer—a wrongness—in her eyes. It’s a trick of the light, it must be, but for a second, it looks like frost, or fog.
“What do you do?” she asks, sounding genuinely interested, and he tells her about The Last Word, and her eyes light up a little. She has always been a reader, and she cannot think of anywhere better than a bookstore. When he pays for the order, their fingers brush, and she cuts him another glance. “See you tomorrow, Henry.”
The barista says his name like she stole it, mischief tugging at her smile.
And he can’t tell if she’s flirting until he gets his drink, and sees the little black arrow she’s drawn, pointing to the bottom, and when he tips it up to see, his heart gives a little thud like an engine turning over.
She’s written her name and number on the bottom of the cup.
|
At The Last Word, Henry unlocks the grate, and the door, while finishing his coffee. He turns the sign and goes through the motions of feeding Book and opening the store and shelving new stock until the bell chimes, announcing his first customer.
Henry winds through the stacks to find an older woman, toddling between the aisles, from HISTORICAL to MYSTERY to ROMANCE and back again. He gives her a few minutes, but when she makes the loop a third time, he steps in.
“Can I help you?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she murmurs, half to herself, but then she turns to look at him, and something changes in her face. “I mean, yes, please, I hope so.” There’s the faintest shine to her eyes, a rheumy glow, as she explains that she’s looking for a book she’s already read.
“These days, I can’t remember what I’ve read, and what I haven’t,” she explains, shaking her head. “Everything sounds familiar. All the covers look the same. Why do they do that? Why do they make everything like everything else?”
Henry assumes it has to do with marketing and trends, but he knows that’s probably not helpful to say. Instead he asks if she remembers anything about it.
“Oh, let’s see. It was a big book. It was about life and death, and history.”
That doesn’t exactly narrow it down, but Henry is used to the lack of details. The number of people who’ve come in, looking for something they’ve seen, able to supply nothing beyond “The cover was red,” or “I think it had the word girl in the title.”
“It was sad, and lovely,” explains the old woman. “I’m sure it was set in England. Oh dear. My mind. I think it had a rose on the cover.”
She looks around at the shelves, wrings her papery hands together. And she’s clearly not going to decide, so he does. Desperately uncomfortable, he tugs a thick historical from the nearest fiction shelf.
“Was it this?” he asks, offering Wolf Hall. But he knows the moment it’s in his hand that it’s not the one. There’s a poppy on the cover, not a rose, and there’s nothing particularly sad or lovely about the life of Thomas Cromwell, even if the writing is beautiful, poignant. “Never mind,” he says,
already reaching to put it back when the old woman’s face lights up with pleasure.
“That’s it!” She grabs his arm with bony fingers. “That’s exactly what I was looking for.” Henry has a hard time believing it, but the woman’s joy is so clear that he begins to doubt himself.
He is about to ring her up when he remembers. Atkinson. Life After Life. A book about life and death and history, sad and lovely, set in England, with a twinned rose on the cover.
“Wait,” he says, ducking around the corner and down the recent fiction aisle to retrieve the book.
“Is this it?”
The woman’s face brightens, exactly as it did before. “Yes! You clever thing, that’s just the one,” she says, with the same conviction.
“Happy I could help,” he says, unsure if he did.
She decides to take both books, says she’s sure that she will love them. The rest of the morning is just as strange.
A middle-aged man comes in searching for a thriller, and leaves with all five titles that Henry recommends. A college student comes looking for a book on Japanese mythology, and when Henry apologizes for not having it, she practically trips over herself to say it’s not his fault, and insists on letting him order it in for her, even though she isn’t sure about the class. A guy with a model’s build and a jaw sharper than a penknife comes to peruse their fantasy section, and he writes his e-mail on the receipt beneath his signature when he pays.
Henry feels off-balance, the way he did when Muriel told him he looked good. It’s like déjà vu, and not like déjà vu at all, because the feeling is entirely new. It’s like April Fool’s, when the rules change, and everything’s a game, and everyone else is in on it, and he’s still marveling over the last encounter, face a little flushed, when Robbie bursts in through the door, chime ringing in his wake.
“Oh my god,” he says, throwing his arms around Henry, and for a moment, he thinks something awful must have happened, before realizing that it already happened to him.
“It’s okay,” says Henry, and of course it’s not, but today has been so weird that everything before it feels a little like a dream. Or maybe this is
the dream? If it is, he’s not all that eager to wake up. “It’s okay,” he says again.
“It doesn’t have to be okay,” says Robbie. “I just want you to know I’m here, I would have been there last night, too—I wanted to come over when you didn’t answer your phone, but Bea said we should give you space, and I don’t know why I listened, I’m sorry.”
It comes out in a single stream of words.
Robbie’s grip tightens as he talks, and Henry savors the embrace. They fit together with the familiar comfort of a well-worn coat. The hug lingers a little too long. Henry clears his throat and pulls back, and Robbie gives an awkward laugh and turns away, his face catching the light, and Henry notices a fine streak of purple along Robbie’s temple, right where it meets his sandy hairline.
“You’re glittering.”
Robbie scrubs halfheartedly at the makeup. “Oh, rehearsal.”
There’s an odd shine in Robbie’s eyes, a glassiness Henry knows too well, and he wonders if Robbie’s on something, or if it’s simply been awhile since he slept. Back in college, Robbie would get so high on drugs or dreams or big ideas that he’d have to burn all the energy out of his system, and then he’d crash.
The door chimes.
“Son of a bitch,” announces Bea, slamming her satchel down on the counter. “Ostrich-minded motherfucker.”
“Customers,” warns Henry, even though the only one currently nearby is a deaf older man, a regular named Michael who frequents the horror section.
“To what do we owe this tantrum?” asks Robbie cheerfully. Drama always puts him in a good mood.
“My asshole adviser,” she says, storming past them toward the art and art history section. They share a look, and trail after her.
“He didn’t like the proposal?” asks Henry.
Bea has been trying to get a dissertation topic approved for the better part of a year.
“He turned it down!” She whips down an aisle, nearly toppling a pile of magazines. Henry follows behind her, doing his best to right the destruction in her wake.
“He said it was too esoteric. As if he’d know the meaning of the word if it blew him.”
“Use it in a sentence?” asks Robbie, but she ignores him, reaching up to pull down a book.
“That closed-minded—” And another.
“—stale-brained—” And another. “—corpse.”
“This isn’t a library,” says Henry as she carries the pile to the low leather chair in the corner and slumps into it, startling the orange lump of fur from between a pair of worn pillows.
“Sorry, Book,” she mutters, lifting the cat gingerly onto the back of the old chair, where he does his best impression of an inconvenienced bread loaf. Bea continues to emit a low stream of curses as she turns the pages.
“I know just what we need,” says Robbie, turning toward the storeroom. “Doesn’t Meredith keep a stash of whisky in the back?”
And even though it’s only 3 P.M., Henry doesn’t protest. He sinks onto the floor, sits with his back to the nearest shelf, legs stretched long, feeling suddenly, unbearably tired.
Bea looks up at him, sighs. “I’m sorry,” she starts, but Henry waves her away.
“Please, continue trashing your advisor and my art history section.
Someone has to behave normally.”
But she closes the book, adds it back to the pile, and joins Henry on the floor.
“Can I tell you something?” Her voice goes up at the end, but he knows it’s not a question. “I’m glad you broke it off with Tabitha.”
A lance of pain, like the cut across his palm. “She broke it off with me.”
Bea waves her hand as if that small detail doesn’t matter. “You deserve someone who loves you as you are. The good and the bad and the maddening.”
You want to be loved. You want to be enough.
Henry swallows. “Yeah, well, being me hasn’t worked out so well.”
Bea leans toward him. “But that’s the thing, Henry, you haven’t been
you. You waste so much time on people who don’t deserve you. People who
don’t know you, because you don’t let them know you.” Bea cups his face, that strange shimmer in her eyes. “Henry, you’re smart, and kind, and infuriating. You hate olives and people who talk during movies. You love milkshakes and people who can laugh until they cry. You think it’s a crime to turn ahead to the end of a book. When you’re angry you get quiet, and when you’re sad you get loud, and you hum when you’re happy.”
“And?”
“And I haven’t heard you hum in years.” Her hands fall away. “But I’ve seen you eat a shit ton of olives.”
Robbie comes back, holding the bottle and three mugs. The Last Word’s only customer toddles out, and then Robbie shuts the door behind him, turning the sign to CLOSED. He comes and sits between Henry and Bea on the floor and uncorks the bottle with his teeth.
“What are we drinking to?” asks Henry.
“To new beginnings,” says Robbie, eyes still shining as he fills the cups.
