Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

They continued up the street with a bit of wonder. The hairs on her skin were alive in a way they hadn’t been five minutes ago. Her hearing was sharper. All her pores were wide open. Her scalp was cold, damp, adrenalized.

Haiti had felt like this. Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, Jacmel. In some neighborhoods they were still waiting for the lights to come back on.

A woman stepped out of a building on the corner. She held a candle in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and as she swept the flashlight across their torsos, Rachel made out the sign above her head and realized they were at the RR bar.

“Oh, hey!” The woman waved the flashlight up and down and the light anointed them before rejoining their bodies at the knees. “What’re you two doing out in this?”

“Looking for her car,” he said. “Then we just decided to look for your bar, then this happened.”

He raised his hands to the dark, and there was another metallic groan, and the lights came back on.

They blinked into the soft shafts of neon cast by the beer sign in the window and the bar sign above the door.

“Nice trick,” the bartender said. “You do birthday parties?”

She opened the door for them and they went inside. It was as Rachel remembered, maybe even better, the lights a little lower, the smell of old beer soaked into black rubber replaced with the faintest hint of hickory. Tom Waits on the jukebox when they came through the door, fading as they ordered their drinks, and replaced by Radiohead from the Pablo Honey era. Tom Waits she could place in his proper context because most of his best music pre-dated her. But it was often a shock, however predictable, however mild, to realize there were people legally drinking in bars who’d been in diapers when Radiohead was part of her college-years soundtrack. We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we’re the last to know.

There was no one else in the bar but them and Gail, the bartender.

Halfway through their first drinks, Rachel said to Brian, “Tell me about the last time I saw you.”

His eyes narrowed in confusion.

“You were with an antiquities dealer.”

He snapped his fingers. “Jack Ahern, right? Was that Jack?”

“It was.”

“We were heading to lunch, ran into you up at the top of Beacon Hill.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, “those are the facts. But I’m after the vibe. You were off that day, m’ man, couldn’t get rid of me quick enough.”

He was nodding. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

“You admit it?”

“Hell, yeah.” He turned on his seat, choosing his words. “Jack was an investor in a small subsidiary I was creating at the time. Nothing big, just a company that makes high-end wood floors and shutters. Jack’s also a self-appointed moralist, very fifteenth century in that regard, Lutheran fundamentalist or Calvinist fundamentalist, I can’t remember which.”

“I get them confused too.”

He shot her a wry grin. “Anyway, I was married then.”

She took a long pull on her drink. “Married?”

“Yeah. Heading for divorce but married in that moment. And I’m a salesman, I was selling that marriage to my moralistic client.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“Then I see you crossing the street toward me and I know if I don’t get ahead of it, he’s gonna see it, so I got all hyper like I do when I’m really nervous and I bungled the whole fucking thing.”

“You said ‘get ahead of it.’ What’s ‘it’?”

He cocked his head and then his eyebrow at her. “Do I really have to say the words?”

“It’s your explanation, my friend.”

“‘It’ would be my attraction to you, Rachel. My ex used to get on me about it — ‘Are you watching your girlfriend on the news again?’ My friends could see it. I’m damn sure Jack Ahern would have picked up on it if my tongue was hanging out in the middle of Beacon Street. I mean, Jesus, ever since Chicopee. Come on.”

“You come on. I didn’t know about this.”

“Oh, well, yeah. I guess, why would you?”

“You could’ve mentioned it.”

“In an e-mail? That you’d be reading with that picture-perfect husband of yours?”

“He was anything but.”

“I didn’t know that at the time. Plus, I was married.”

“What happened to her?”

“She left. Went back to Canada.”

“So we’re both divorced.”

He nodded and raised his glass. “To that.”

She clinked his glass, drained her own, and they ordered two more.

She said, “Tell me something you don’t like about yourself.”

“I don’t like? I thought the point was to show off your best self in the early going.”

“The early going of what?”

“Meeting someone.”

“Dating? Are we calling this a date?”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way yet.”

“You’ve got your drink, I’ve got mine, we’re turned toward each other, trying to ascertain if we enjoy each other’s company enough to do it again.”

“That does sound like a date.” He held up a finger. “Unless it’s like an NFL preseason game to a date.”

“MLB spring training to a date,” she said. “Wait, what do they call the preseason in the NBA?”

“The preseason.”

“I know, but what do they call it?”

“That’s what they call it.”

“You sure? Seems unoriginal.”

“And yet there it is.”

“And how about the NHL?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“But you’re Canadian.”

“Yes,” he admitted, “but I’m not very good at it.”

They both laughed for no other reason but that her mother’s first stage — the spark — had been reached. Somewhere from the walk along cobblestones on a block so quiet the only sounds were the echoes of their footsteps to the smell of his damp raincoat collar under her chin to the two-minute blackout to the birthing of them as a duo as they crossed the threshold into the bar and Tom Waits growled softly through a fading chorus to right now, bantering over a vodka and a scotch respectively, they’d crossed a second threshold — leaving behind who they’d been before their attraction had been certified mutual and moving forward with that attraction taken as a given.

“What don’t I like about myself ?”

She nodded.

He lifted his drink and rattled the cubes softly from one side of the glass to the other. The playfulness left his face and was replaced by something sad and bewildered though not bitter. She liked that lack of bitterness immediately. She’d grown up in a house of bitterness and then, when she was sure it would never touch her again, she married it. She’d had her fill.

Brian said, “You know when you’re a kid and you don’t get picked for the team, or someone you like doesn’t like you back, or your parents reject or marginalize you not because of something you did but because they were fucked up and toxic?”

“Yes and yes and yes. I can’t wait to see where you’re going with this.”

Now he took a drink. “I think of those times — and there are lots of them in a childhood; they accrue — and I realize that I always believed to my core that they were right. I wasn’t worthy of the team, I wasn’t fit to be liked back, my family rejected me because I deserved to be rejected.” He put his glass on the bar. “What I don’t like about myself is that sometimes I don’t really like myself.”

“And no matter how much good you do,” she said, “no matter how great a friend you are, how great a wife or husband, how great a humanitarian, nothing, I mean, nothing—”

“Nothing,” he said.

“—will ever make up for what a piece of shit you really are.”