Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

Was this what she’d missed being holed up so much of her time? It wasn’t like she didn’t get out, but she certainly didn’t get out much. Maybe she’d overlooked the prevalence of some styles. When had all men decided, for example, to stop shaving until every third or fourth day? When had half-fedoras and porkpie hats come back into style? Where did the brightly colored tennis shoe spring from? When was the moment all casual bicyclists decided they should dress in skintight spandex, replete with brand names all over the shirts and leggings, as if they required corporate sponsorship to pedal to Starbucks?

Back when Rachel had been in college, hadn’t every third boy worn a plaid shirt, V-neck tee, and ripped jeans? If she went to the hotel bars frequented by middle-aged Republican salesmen right now, how many would be dressed in light blue oxford shirts and tan pants? So, by that metric, wasn’t it entirely possible that the combination of dark pullover, white T-shirt, and blue jeans — which had probably never gone fully in or out of style, basic as it was — could be worn by three men in Boston-Cambridge on the same day? If she walked through a mall right now, she’d probably see it on a couple more, not to mention on the mannequins fronting the J. Crew and Vince stores.

Their food arrived. Caleb made short work of his burger, and she devoured her salad. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

When they’d both cleaned their plates, they sat in the warmth of the low lights and gathering dusk. The rain had let up and a steady stream of footsteps returned to the cobblestones just above their heads as people ventured back out into the evening.

His smile wrapped around his bourbon as he raised the glass to his lips.

She could feel the wine when she smiled back.

They’d shared a moment — no more than that — when she’d first been dating Brian. In a pantry at the apartment of a friend of Brian’s in the Fenway. Rachel had gone into the pantry for olives, Caleb had been coming out with Stoned Wheat Thins, if she remembered correctly, and they’d paused as their bodies passed. Their eyes met and neither dropped their gaze. Then it became something of a challenge — who literally would blink first?

“Hi,” she’d said.

“Hi.” The word stumbled out of the back of his throat.

Vasoconstriction, she remembered thinking. The process by which skin capillaries constrict in order to elevate core body temperature. Corresponding increase in respiratory rate and heartbeat. A flush to the skin.

She’d leaned toward him at the same moment he’d leaned toward her and their heads touched, her breasts pressed against his chest, the edge of his right hand brushed the edge of her left on its way to her hip. Of all the places their bodies met in that second or two, it was most intimate when his hand grazed hers. When that hand found her hip, she turned away and sidestepped deeper into the pantry. He let out a small sound — some hybrid hiccup-laugh of amazement and exasperation and embarrassment — and was gone from the pantry in the time it took for her to look back.

Vasodilation: When the core body temperature is too high, blood vessels below the skin dilate so heat can escape the body and core temperature can be restored.

It took her almost five minutes to figure out where the fucking olives were.

She sipped her wine and Caleb sipped his bourbon and the bar filled up around them. Soon they couldn’t see the door. In the past, that could have easily shot bolts of anxiety into her bloodstream, but tonight it only made things seem warmer, more intimate.

“How’s Brian been handling all this rain?” Caleb asked.

“You know him — positive mental attitude. He’s the only person in the city who hasn’t bitched about it yet.”

Caleb shook his head. “Same at the office. We’re all drowning, he’s like, ‘It creates a mood.’”

She finished the sentence with him. “He says the same thing at home. I’m like, ‘What mood? Abject depression?’ He says, ‘No. It’s fun. It’s sexy.’ I said, ‘Honey, it was fun and sexy on day one, and that was ten days ago.’”

Caleb chuckled into his glass, took a drink. “Man would find a silver lining in a concentration camp. ‘You don’t see barbed wire of that quality in other death camps. Plus the showerheads are top-notch.’”

Rachel drank some more wine. “It’s awesome.”

“It is awesome.”

“But it can be exhausting.”

“Wipe you the fuck out. I never met someone who needs positivity like that guy. And it’s weird ’cause it’s not like Hallmark positivity, it’s just a can-do thing. You know?”

“Oh, I know. Do I ever know.” She smiled at the thought of her husband. Couldn’t stand movies with bummer endings, books where the hero lost, songs about alienation.

“I get it,” he’d said to her once. “I read Sartre in college, I had friends who dragged me to a Nine Inch Nails concert. The world’s a pointless, chaotic mess where nothing means nothing. I do understand. I just choose not to engage that philosophy because it doesn’t help me.”

Brian, she’d long ago realized with both admiration and irritation, didn’t do depressing. He didn’t do hopeless or bleak chic or whining. Brian did objectives and strategies and remedies. Brian did hope.

Once, during an irritable mood, when Brian said, “Anything’s possible,” she said, “No, Brian, it’s not. Curing world hunger is not possible, flapping our arms to take flight is not possible.”

A small, strange fire grew in his eyes. “No one’s got long game anymore. Everyone wants it now.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“That if you believe, really believe, and if your strategy is sound, and if you’re willing to leave everything you’ve got on the field of battle to win the day” — he held his arms wide — “you can do anything .”

She’d smiled at him and left the room before she’d be forced to decide if the man she’d married was just a tiny bit crazy.

On the other hand, she never had to worry about him whining or bitching or kvetching in any way. Sebastian, no surprise, had been a whiner. A glass-half-empty negativist who showed in a thousand ways, both large and small, that he believed the world awoke every morning thinking about ways to urinate in his food. Brian, on the other hand, seemed to approach each day as if there was a present hidden somewhere within it. And if he didn’t find it, there’d be no point bitching about it.

Another Brianism: “A complaint that’s not looking for a solution is a disease that’s not looking for a cure.”

Caleb said, “He loves quoting that one at the office. I keep expecting to see it on a plaque someday, hanging in the waiting room.”

“You gotta admit, though, it really works for him. You ever known Brian to stay in a bad mood more than a few minutes?”

He nodded. “I’ll give you that. Why, some people would follow him into a burning cave — they just feel he’d get them out the other side somehow.”

She liked that. It made her see her husband as heroic for a moment, a leader, an inspiration.

She sat back in her chair and Caleb sat back in his and for a minute or so neither of them said a word.

“You look good,” Caleb said eventually. “I mean, you always look good, but you look...”

She watched him search for the word.

He found it. “Secure.”

Had anyone ever said that about her? Her mother used to say she rushed around so much she would’ve forgotten her head most days if it wasn’t already attached. Two ex-boyfriends and her ex-husband had all told her she was “anxious.” In her twenties, alcohol, cigarettes, and books, always books, could anchor her in place. When she quit smoking, a treadmill replaced the window seat until her doctor, noting a rash of shin splints and a pretty significant weight drop in a body that was never in danger of being overweight, convinced her to complement the running with yoga. Worked well for a while, but the yoga eventually led to the “visions” and the visions, post-Haiti, led to the panic attacks.