David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

After eating dinner she turns her cellphone on and finds a new message, from Garrett. You’re not answering your email. Call me. Contact me . What time is it, eight o’clock? A couple of hits now and it’ll wear off by movie time. She goes to the freezer and pinches just that much off a bud. It’s cool in the living room, where the original wood paneling has been cured in a couple of centuries of smoke from the original walk-in fireplace. She presses her nose into the wall, wishing to exchange molecules with that aroma, then lies back on the long leather sofa with her head propped up and starts her iPod—a mix Renaldo made for her, which sounds cold and clattery. The second song takes a much longer time to go by than the first, and when she’s somewhere in the middle of the next one she can’t remember back to the first song—oh, good, this is good. If you could be like this all the time, you’d never worry about the years flying by, because even an hour is just so full. Too full, actually.

She wakes up on the sofa in full morning light. She’d considered going up to the bedroom, but it would’ve been hot and she would’ve had to deal with the fan and, let’s admit it, she’d been afraid Elena might be up there. One of the big buds is gone, and half the bottle of sherry. She starts coffee; that should take care of the headache, though Satan’s whispering, How’s about a little drinkie? She eats a handful of raisins and—though it’s way off schedule—goes upstairs to get into her bikini.

The lake water feels so cold she just stands there up to her knees, hugging herself. She looks around: at this time of morning there’s nobody here to see her punk out. Just a thin little girl whose fat mommy is yelling, “That doesn’t work for me!” What has the little girl done?

Back at the house, she finds rackets and some cans of balls in the mudroom and goes out to the tennis court. She hits a half-dozen balls over the net, then walks over, barefoot on the hot clay, and hits them back. Okay, clearly, she can’t put this off any longer. She goes back inside and turns on her cell.

“Hey, I was about to give up on you,” Garrett says. “Listen, some friends of mine invited me up to Kent this weekend. That’s not too far from you, right?”

“Don’t you get enough action with my sister?” she says. “ And your wife?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but somehow I got the idea that you and I both sort of take things on a case-by-case basis.”

“You’re making me wet,” she says.

“Okay, you’re pissed at me. I’ll give you a call when I get up there tomorrow night.”

“You really like yourself, don’t you?”

“I’ll pass on that one,” he says. “How about you?”

—

Lily and Matt had broken up a year before Portia’s marriage ended—which was counterintuitive, because shouldn’t the less traditional couple be revealed to have the stronger foundation, or was this counter-counterintuitive? She’d moved into Matt’s low-tide-smelling factory loft in Greenpoint, where he used to live with Melanie, his previous girlfriend. One night the bass player in his band said, “Thanks, Mel,” as Lily passed him a platter of couscous and lamb; when she brought it up later, Matt said it wasn’t his fault. That was when she got the idea to fuck the bass player.

He was a tall, lanky specimen, like all bass players, named Rob. Called Rob, strictly speaking. This would be a one-shot deal, off in its own space: wear a halter top to a gig, brush the girls against his arm, email him to consult about a gift for Matt’s birthday, meet him at Sam Ash, go for a drink afterward. Portia herself couldn’t have done it more efficiently.

When Lily refused to go to his place a second time, Rob quit the band and moved back to Chapel Hill, which wasn’t at all the spirit of the thing. And then she began to email him—not only men were allowed to send mixed signals!—and of course Matt got into her email, and so on.

By the time Portia found out about her husband’s girlfriend in Bilbao, Lily was able to give her refuge in Brooklyn Heights, on the foldout she’d been so prescient to buy. Every night they drank a bottle of Sancerre apiece and watched one of the old movies their father had loved; Portia always sobbed at the happy endings, then kept sobbing, even after Lily had clicked over to CNN.

“I felt like Daddy was watching with us,” she said one night, when Swing Time was over and Larry King had Ed Asner on, talking about his autistic son.

“I’m curious,” Lily said. “What kind of stuff does he say? You know, when he’s speaking to you?”

“He just says—I don’t want to say.” She began to cry again. “He says, ‘I’m taking care of you now.’ ”

“I wish he’d spread it around a little,” Lily said.

“I don’t know,” Portia said. “He’s not doing that good of a job.”

Portia had never liked getting high when they were teenagers, but Lily asked around and found some weed sneaky enough not to panic her at first. But they overdid anyway, and after vomiting (Lily used the sink and let Portia have the toilet) they lay spooned on the bathroom floor the rest of the night. “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” Portia said in the morning, when they finally felt okay to go to bed. “But that was the most fun I’ve ever had with you.”

Portia had met Garrett when some of her friends brought some of their friends to the housewarming at her new apartment. Lily had disliked him—the leather jacket plus the soul patch plus the wedding ring. She overheard him telling Portia that he’d rather read Edith Wharton than Henry James—clever fellow—and then he whispered something and flicked her earlobe with his tongue.

“But what’s in it for you?” Lily asked her a couple of weeks later.

“Nothing,” Portia said. “I mean, the obvious. What you used to call it—uninhabited sex? I just don’t really trust him.”

“Why would you?”

“I don’t mean it like that . I mean, of course not. I mean, I think he could get really angry?”

“Oh, honey,” Lily said. “So does the wife know?”

Portia refilled her glass and passed the bottle to Lily. “Who knows what that’s about. Why are you trying to make me feel bad? I don’t go off on you . And your weird stuff. Actually, he reminds me of you.” Portia had promised to drive up with Lily to spend the Fourth with their mother in Dennis Port, just the three of them, and they would take the Hobie Cat out and scatter the ashes. Lily had already reserved a rental car. Then Portia called to say that Garrett had invited them both to watch fireworks.

“Great, so Mom’s going to be alone on the Fourth.”

“This can’t wait one day? Anyhow, the Rosenmans are going to be having their usual bash. She’ll be fine with it.”

“Are you going to be fine with it?”

“Listen, I just need to do this, okay?” Portia said. “I thought you were supposed to be the great mind.”

But surely only the mind of Omniscience could have foreseen that Portia would go into the bedroom with the host, a lean man in his sixties with a trimmed white beard, and his plump young wife. And that she herself would let this Garrett tell her these were “cool people,” that Portia would be okay, and that they could share a cab back to Brooklyn.

—

On Thursday night the parking lot at Tony’s is full—weekenders getting an early start. She’s chosen her black tank top, nothing under it, and taken out her contacts in favor of her black-rimmed glasses, to make herself look more violable. There’s a lone pool table with a faux-Tiffany lamp above it and three televisions over the bar, the sound off, playing what look to be two different baseball games. Lily takes a stool at the end of the bar with an empty stool next to it. The bartender looks like—it takes her a second—the gink who sings “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” with Ruby Keeler! Whose name she happens to know is Clarence Nordstrom.