David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

She orders a gin and tonic and begins watching the Red Sox and Cleveland. The batter in the whiter uniform has pants that come down to his feet like pajama bottoms, but so tight you can see his kneecaps. When she was thirteen and had hit a home run in softball at summer camp, her father took her down to Philadelphia, where the Phillies lost a doubleheader to Atlanta. He’d said, “Only the Braves deserve the pair,” and refused to tell her why that was funny. She can’t really taste the gin, which is either why you should never order gin and tonic or why you should always. She turns to check out the room—stools that swivel! the best!—and some guy’s already coming toward her, as if she’s the drop of blood in a cubic mile of ocean.

“I almost didn’t recognize you with the hair,” he says. “Looks good, actually.” His eyes go to her breasts. “Evan.”

“Evan, right.” The video store. “Lily. Actually, it should be Portia.” Oh my: Clarence Nordstrom does pour a good one. “At least it’s not Elena, right?”

His eyebrows come in toward his nose. “What’s wrong with Elena?”

“Now that,” she says, “is genuinely funny. I’m liking you already.” She leans forward—okay, embarrassing, but—and fiddles with the hem of her jeans long enough for him to see what there is to see. Then she straightens up and looks him in the eyes, which is easier than you’d think: you look at the eyes. “What are you drinking, Evan ?”

“Let me.” He raises a finger and Clarence Nordstrom is there. “Another one for the young lady,” he says, “and I’ll have…” He looks at the bottles behind the bar. “Knob Creek rocks?”

“ Grazie ,” she says. “So Evan . Is this a place where nothing ever happens?”

“Apparently not,” he says. Oh, now surely he’s in the right age demographic to have listened to Talking Heads. She thinks to check his ring finger. No. But he’s been married, you can just tell. The bartender sets the drinks down. “So tell me something, is that what you do?” she says. “Work at the video store?”

“Actually, during the year I teach media studies.” He raises his glass. “Success to crime. What do you do?”

“Work for a magazine nobody’s ever heard of,” she says. “I mean I used to.”

He does his eyebrow thing again; it’s imaginable that someone might find it fetching. “And you live in the city?”

“You’re remarkable,” she says.

“I’m not.” He takes a sip and she sees he’s already down to ice cubes.

“Oh. Well, maybe I’m just setting the bar low tonight.”

“Then you’re just up here visiting?”

“Tell you what,” she says. “Why don’t we finish up the due diligence, and then I have some very expensive sherry back at the house.” She’ll decide later if weed will scandalize him.

“Really,” he says. “Whatever the catch is, it must be a doozy.”

“Oh, I like a man who says ‘doozy.’ ” She fishes out her lime wedge, sets it on the bar and rocks it with her fingertip. “Do you know ‘Wynken, Blynken and Nod’?” She leans forward again—those pesky jeans! “What’s the trouble, do you not want to?”

“Oh no, believe me,” he says. “Just, I should probably tell you I’ve sort of been seeing somebody. Does that bother you?”

“Ah,” she says. “So you’re the one with the doozy. No, actually this makes me very happy. I mean, as long as she’s not waiting outside with a gun.” She drains her glass. “It is a she?”

His mouth comes open. “What the fuck?”

“That’s better. You were starting to lose me when you were being so nice. I have to go use the doozy.” She gets off her stool and stands up just fine.

—

“Daddy used to say he was a high-functioning workaholic,” Portia said at the memorial, and got the laugh. “But today I wanted to tell you some things you didn’t know.” Their father had asked them both to speak, along with Joe Hagerty, but Lily froze while trying to write something. It was Portia who’d pulled herself together to get up there and wing it from a half-page of notes, who’d dealt with the Harvard Club and even hired the fucking bagpiper.

Lily had been waiting in the cottage when they’d brought him home to die. They’d taken him off the plane on a stretcher, but her mother said he’d sat up straight in his seat all the way from New York. High on the morphine and the five-hundred-dollar-an-ounce hydroponic Lily found for him—a last-minute appeal to Matt—he asked her to read him “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” probably for some drifty Rosebud reason. She had to go online to find it, and now she can remember only something about rocking in the misty sea, and that the original title was “Dutch Lullaby.”

And then she’d missed the main event because she had to be at work. She’d run through her vacation time—a stupid trip down to Chapel Hill—and the magazine would give her only two weeks of family leave, plus her personal day. When they must already have been planning to lay her off! That Tuesday night, while her car was warming up in the driveway, she promised her father she’d be back on Friday, very late. According to Portia, he’d tried to wait for her—he’d made it till three that afternoon—but the fact remained.

Their father, Portia told his friends and colleagues, had taken them to see Dexter Gordon at the Blue Note and Pavarotti at the Met and Nureyev at ABT, taught them to sail and to change a tire. Every Wednesday had been movie night, eight o’clock sharp. “When I was little,” she said, “I believed that Fred Astaire could actually dance on the ceiling. I believed my father could too. And Daddy, I always will.” Well: after that, one hardly needed “Amazing Grace.”

—

When she finally gets poor Evan out of Tony’s bar, Lily keeps his headlights in her rearview mirror, though what’s she going to do if he takes it into his head to peel off? He pulls up next to her in the driveway, and she sees him turn his cell off before getting out of his car.

“You know, I go by here all the time,” he says. “I always wondered what it was like inside. How old is this house?”

“Old.” She takes him by the hand. “Come.”

She has to put the candle over on the dresser so the fan doesn’t blow it out, and in this light he’s really not unthinkable. After he gets off the first time she has to persuade him that no, she likes getting (as he puts it) turned over, and then she has to talk him through it. So it was smart to have said nothing about weed. This time he groans as if wounded. Sweet man. The due diligence had revealed that he was divorced and that, surprise surprise, the wife got the house.

After his breathing smooths out, with a growl at the end of every outbreath, she eases out of bed and goes down to the kitchen. She takes one hit—just one, or she’ll never get to sleep—and settles onto the sofa, gets to work with her fingers, then has a superstitious thought: she mustn’t come while thinking up Elena—or else in that white instant when she’s bodiless she’ll find Elena there, waiting to snatch her through into the world of the dead! Okay well now she has to, just to prove the thought wrong. When she returns to herself, still breathing hard, she understands what a crazy risk she’s just taken.

She goes back upstairs, lies down so they’re not touching and feels herself start to drift. Poor, sweet man. But then it’s daylight and he’s all over her again.

“What time is it, baby?” She rolls out from under him. Maybe she can get out of this one with hands and the Astroglide she was so prescient to pack—or how about her hands cupped around his hands? This always got Matt.