Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“Sorry,” Gary said.

“Two hundred. Would you do it for two hundred?”

“No, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s crazy, Anton, I’m sorry. I’ve known you forever. And I gotta tell you, man, you’ve just been a little out there lately.”

“Why? Because I miss my cat? I’ve been here for six weeks, Gary. It’s lonely as hell.”

“No, because you left your wife on your honeymoon and now you want me to take the cat from her too, and all this after you cheated on her with your secretary. You ever stop to think about what kind of a person you are?”

“I do, actually. I think about it all the time.”

“And you can still sleep at night? Because it’s just not admirable, Anton. It isn’t. And look, hey, you know I’m not one to judge, I’ve always been here for you, I was the guy you called and went for beers with every time she fucking canceled a wedding on you, man, but how could you leave your wife on your honeymoon?”

“You don’t understand, there were—”

“Oh Christ, let me guess. There were mitigating circumstances.”

“Well, yes, there—”

“How fucking mitigating could a circumstance possibly be?”

“Pretty mitigating,” Anton said.

“She cheated on you? She tried to kill you? What?”

“No. Nothing like that. It wasn’t anything she did. Look, I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry,” Anton said. “I just can’t.”

The phone call ended badly and afterward Anton went to the café closest to the water. It was the only café on the piazza that still kept regular hours, the only one frequented by the fishermen; the other cafés were opening later and closing earlier as the supply of tourists dwindled and colder winds moved over the surface of the sea. He suspected that the nozzle on this particular café’s milk frother wasn’t cleaned very often — the lattes tasted slightly like yogurt — but the beer was decent and the grilled panini were good. He’d taken to watching the sunset from this place. Anton sat outside in the last light of afternoon, thinking about his cat and about all the things he should have said to Gary.

Later he took a circuitous walk that lasted three hours and returned to the café after dark to get drunk. There were other lonely foreigners in the piazza that night. They came together as the café emptied out and shared three bottles of wine, and when the café had closed they sat together on a pier: Anton, a couple of Germans who spoke English, another American whose name he didn’t know. The Germans were catching an early flight back to Munich; after a while they went back to their hotel and then it was just Anton and the other American, some guy from Michigan. Anton sat on his hands and looked down at the water, the slick of lights on the surface. He was cold. The effervescence of the previous few hours was fading. He was starting to think about the singer and her gun and his far-off cat again.

“I can’t remember your name,” Anton said finally. “Did you tell me?”

“David Grissom.”

“Anton Waker. Pleasure.” He reached sideways to shake David’s hand. “I’ve seen you around here a few times before tonight. Doing the crossword puzzle. Sketching stuff. I think we’re staying in the same hotel.”

“Yeah, I’ve been here a few weeks.”

“Long vacation?”

“Staying here a while. Painting,” David said.

“You know, that’s a skill I always wanted. I could never even draw.”

“It’s an overrated talent.” David seemed uninterested in the subject. “Where do you live?”

“Here. I used to live in New York, but I don’t think I’m going back there. You?”

“No fixed address, as they say in the newspapers. I’ve been drifting around Europe for a while.”

“What do you do, aside from traveling and painting?”

“You know, I used to think that was the most banal question,” David said. “ What do you do? I used to think it was synonymous with How much money do you make? But lately I’ve begun to think it’s the most important question you can ask someone. What do you do? What are you doing? What is your method of conducting your life, by what means do you move through the world? Important information, isn’t it? But I’m sorry, I’m rambling. Is that bottle empty? In answer to your question, I travel aimlessly and try not to think too much. I work odd jobs and paint still-life paintings and then throw out the canvases every time I move to a new place, unless I can sell them to tourists, which only happens if I paint landscapes. I’m going to ask what you do in a minute, bear with me, but first, what’s the most important question you’ve ever been asked?”

“The most important. .?”

“It’s a subject that interests me,” David said. “I used to start conversations the regular way — you know, Hi, how are you, how ’bout this weather we’re having —but then a few years ago, around the time my wife died, I developed an allergy to small talk. So lately I’ve been starting with that question, and I find it makes all the conversations I’m in more interesting. Also, I’m drunk.”

“It’s a good question.” Anton was quiet for a moment. “A girl in New York asked me something once. She said, What was it like when you were growing up? ”

“What was it like when you were growing up. That’s good. That’s very good. I’ll remember that one. What do you do?”

“Me?” Anton raised the wine bottle to his lips, drank for a moment and set it back on the pier. “Nothing good. Nothing at all, actually. I’m not doing anything but waiting. Can’t we just ask each other what we used to do? Because the present, well, I have to tell you, I don’t like the present very much.”

“I used to sell cocaine to art school kids in Michigan,” David said.

“Really?”

“Not a bad business,” David said. “I only left Detroit because my wife died.”

“I’m sorry about your wife. I used to work at a consulting firm,” Anton said, “but I think it’s safe to say that that career’s more or less over. Now I’m just waiting to perform a transaction. I’ve been waiting for a while now.”

“What kind of transaction?”

“One I’d rather not do,” Anton said. “It’s nothing, actually. I just have to give a package to someone, and after that I’ll be free. The waiting’s killing me, though. I’m not sure there’s anything much worse than this.”

“Really? You don’t think there’s anything much worse than sitting on a pier on the southern coast of Italy drinking wine?” David was smiling. “How drunk are you, exactly?”

“Drunker than I’ve been in a while. I meant there’s nothing much worse than this limbo ,” Anton said. “This waiting. All this waiting, and I have nothing to go back to once the waiting’s done. There’s nothing left in New York City. It isn’t just that my marriage is over, it’s that it never should have started in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking. She was a once-in-a-lifetime person, but that doesn’t mean I should have married her. There’s nothing left there for me there except my cat and a girl I had an affair with once.”

“Do you love her?”

“The girl? I don’t know. A little. Yes. Okay, the thing is, I miss her, but not as much as I miss my cat.”

“Your cat.”

“Jim. He’s not just any cat, I rescued him when he was a little kitten. I was walking one night with Sophie, my wife, back when we were still just dating. It was raining, and there was this little wet shivering kitten in a doorway. He almost died. Lost an eye to infection. I tried to get my best friend to kidnap him and ship him over just now, but he wouldn’t do it.”