Wally Lamb - The Hour I First Believed

“Maybe this is their year, huh?”

“Maybe.” He didn’t sound like he gave a shit either way.

He was in Rhonda’s creative writing class, too. She’d come into the staff room sputtering about him one day. “Read this,” she said. “Is this sick or what?” He’d written a two-page story about a mysterious avenger in a metal-studded black trench coat. As jocks and “college preps” leave a busy bar, he pulls pistols and explosives out of his duffel bag, wastes them, and walks away, smiling. “Do you think I should call his parents?” Rhonda had asked.

I’d shrugged. “A lot of the guys write this kind of crap. Too many video games, too much testosterone. I wouldn’t worry about it. He probably just needs a girlfriend.” She had worried, though, enough to make that call. She’d referred to the meeting, a week or so later, as “a waste of time.”

The door banged open; five or six rowdy kids entered Blackjack. “Hey, I’ll see you later,” I said.

“Later,” he said. And I remember thinking he’d make a good Marine. Clean-cut, conscientious, his ironed T-shirt tucked neatly into his wrinkle-free shorts. Give him a few years, I figured, and he’d probably be officer material.

AT DINNER THAT NIGHT, MAUREEN suggested we go out to a movie, but I begged off, citing end-of-the-week exhaustion. She cleaned up, I fed the dogs, and we adjourned to our separate TVs. By ten o’clock, I was parked on my recliner, watching Homicide with the closed-caption activated, my belly full of pizza. There was a Newsweek opened on my lap for commercial breaks, a Pete’s Wicked ale resting against my crotch, and a Van Morrison CD reverberating inside my skull: Astral Weeks, a record that had been released in 1968, the year I turned seventeen.

I was forty-seven that Friday night. A month earlier, a guy in a music chat room I’d begun visiting had posed the question, “What are the ten masterworks of the rock era?” Dozens of us had begun devising our lists, posting them as works in progress and busting each other’s chops about our selections. (I came to picture my cyber-rockin’ brethren as a single balding fat guy in a tie-dye T-shirt—size XL when XXL would have been a better fit.) My masterwork choices were as controversial as the next guy’s. I incurred the good-natured wrath of several of my cyberbuddies, for instance, when I named to my list Springsteen’s Nebraska while excluding Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. “Dude, as spokesman for the Boss’s TRUE fans,” a trash-to-energy engineer from Michigan messaged me, “I regret to inform you that you’re more f***ed up than a soup sandwich!” I dished it out, too, of course, not always successfully. I learned that I’d deeply offended a professor of medieval literature by stating that the bloodline of the Backstreet Boys could be traced to that other vapid and overrated boy band of an earlier era, the Beach Boys. The scholar asked if he could communicate with me privately, and I obliged him with my address. A week later, I received a FedEx envelope, postage paid by Princeton University, which contained an erudite (if unconvincing) eleven-page defense of the album Pet Sounds.

For weeks, listening and list-making had consumed me: Sgt. Pepper or Songs in the Key of Life? Aretha or Etta James? I’d saved my tenth and final berth for the unorthodox but always interesting Van Morrison but was having trouble deciding between Van the Man’s elegant Moondance and his more emotionally raw Astral Weeks. Thus, that Friday night, the earphones.

But it was armor, all of it, I see that now: the TV, the open magazine, the aural review of my life, the keyboard chatter. I’d safeguarded myself in multimedia chain mail to prevent emotional penetration from Maureen.

A shadow moved across the carpet, and I looked up from Homicide to her. “Caelum?” her lips said. She was holding our wicker tray, two glasses of red wine counterbalanced by a lit candle. I watched the wine rock in the glasses while she waited. The candle was scented—spice of some kind. She was into Enya and aromatherapy back then.

I lifted my left earphone. “Yeah, give me a few minutes,” I said. “I want to let the dogs out, catch a little of the news. I’ll be up.”

Maureen, her wines, and her defeated shoulders turned and started up the stairs. I could read Mo from the back, same as I could the other two. But reading and responding are two different things. “Look, don’t just stare at the pages,” I used to tell my students. “Become the characters. Live inside the book.” And they’d sit there, staring back politely at the alien from Planet Irrelevance.

Maureen’s my three-strikes-and-you’re-out spouse and, as far as I know, the only one of the trinity who ever cheated on me. That lit candle on the tray? It’s one of the signals she and I came up with back in Connecticut, back in 1994, during the sensitizing humiliation of couples counseling—those seven sessions we attended in the aftermath of her Courtyard Marriott fuck-fests with Paul Hay.

Whom I’d met a few times at her staff parties. Who was in our Rolodex. Come to think of it, we must have been in the Hays’ Rolodex, too.

HELLO?” I SAID. ORDINARILY, WHEN the phone rang while I was grading papers, I’d let the machine get it. But the rain that March night had started making clicking sounds against the floorboards of the deck and the dogs had come back inside wearing ice crystals on their backs. Nervous about Mo’s driving home from tai chi on treacherous roads, I was half waiting for a call.

“May I speak to Maureen Quirk?” the woman asked.

“She’s out,” I said.

“Are you Mr. Quirk?”

“Yeah, but look. No telemarketing at this number. Take us off your—”

“Do you know who Maureen’s out with?”

I uncapped my pen. Tore off a piece of some kid’s blue book to jot down her number. “Excuse me,” I said. “Who’d you say this is?”

She identified herself not by name but by association: she was Trina Hay’s best friend. Trina was sitting right there next to her, she said, but too upset to talk on the phone. “We just wanted you to know, in case you don’t know, that your wife’s having an affair with Paul.”

I said nothing for several seconds, but when I finally did speak, all I could come up with was, “Paul who?”

“Paul Hay,” she said. “Trina’s husband. Did you know they have a little boy named Casey? Or that Trina has lupus? Or that they’re building a house?” Jesus, she was giving me the whole A&E Biography, and I was still on Paul Hay? Paul Hay? Where do I know that name from? Maureen’s betrayal hadn’t broken the surface yet. Or maybe it had, because my instinct was to kill the messenger.

“So what are you—some no-life chick’s gotta borrow her friend’s business?” I asked.

“This is my business, okay?” she said. “I’m Casey’s godmother.”

“You’re fat, aren’t you? You have a fat voice.”

“Do you know who bought Trina and Paul the lot they’re building their house on? Trina’s father, that’s who. The month before he died.”

“Your options are limited, right? It’s either Tina’s problems or a spoon, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s between your knees, and Touched by an Angel.”

“Her name’s Trina, okay? And my personal life is none of your business. Just tell your little slut of a wife that if she thinks she’s moving into Trina’s new house when it’s finished, she’s…she’s…”

There was dead air for a few seconds, some muffled whispering. Then the avenger was back on the line, blubbering. “I am trying to stop your wife from destroying my friend’s marriage. Okay?”

“Yeah, sure, Fat Chunks. Your Nobel Peace Prize is in the mail.” I can’t remember which of us hung up on the other.