Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“You hungry?” Ben said boisterously. “You must be starving.”

“Not really,” Hamilton said.

Ben’s concern was mixed with relief since there was hardly any food in the house. Everything he’d been told about this Hamilton Barth character, or had read somewhere about him — his pretension, his genius, his tortured-soul routine — was suddenly dwarfed by the need to make some kind of masculine connection with him, to keep him from sticking his head in Ben’s oven or hanging himself with Ben’s belt. “How about a drink, then?” he said.

Hamilton’s head turned slowly in his direction. The windows were still covered by rags; new blinds had been purchased, but Ben was going to have to hire one of the hardware store owner’s sons to come put them up.

“What time of day is it?” Hamilton asked.

It was around one-thirty, but Ben just shrugged. “Five o’clock somewhere,” he said, an expression he’d always hated. “Come on, we can’t get in any trouble as long as we stay in the house. Come out to the kitchen with me,” he said as he might have said to a small child, “and let’s see what we’ve got.”

There was a bottle of rum, which he didn’t remember buying. It might have been there in the cupboard above the fridge since before the house went on the market, for all he knew. Anyway, mixed with some orange and cranberry juice it tasted like something legitimate to drink in the middle of the day. They finished their first one in silence; Ben took the glass from Hamilton’s fingers and poured another. He could see raindrops on the windowsill. So what, Ben thought, it’s not like we were going to take a stroll around the neighborhood anyway.

He found it surprising that Hamilton, distracted and depressed as he may have been, didn’t ask any more questions about where he was, neither about the place nor about Ben himself: How is it you are living in your own home without any furniture? Why don’t you have a job to go to? That kind of thing. But the man was a celebrity, a movie star. Even at his lowest moment — especially at his lowest moment — he just took it for granted that people’s curiosity would bend toward him.

“So you grew up in Malloy, huh?” Ben said, into the mouth of his glass. Hamilton’s chin lifted slightly, and he nodded.

“I’ve never been there myself,” Ben said, just to keep silence from reasserting itself. “I’ve been to Watertown once, after her mother died.”

“Helen’s mother died?” Hamilton said.

“Yeah,” Ben said, trying not to sound unreasonably excited that he had gotten Hamilton to say anything at all. “In Florida, actually, but we had to go and close up the house and whatnot. She used to tell me that Watertown was like the big city compared to Malloy. But you’d know all about that.”

Hamilton considered it. “Probably I remember that about it,” he said. “I’ve forgotten a lot. Truthfully I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere anymore. I’m just here in the now.”

“Sure,” said Ben, as convincingly as he could. “Naturally.”

They heard a man’s voice outside in the street. Trying to appear casual, like an actor carrying out some stage business in a play, Ben crossed the kitchen and stood between Hamilton and the uncovered window.

“But you two did know each other as kids,” Ben said. “In a little town like that. So what was Helen like, as a kid? I used to wonder about that.”

“Truthfully,” Hamilton said, “I don’t remember her at all, but it’s seriously nothing personal, I forget everybody from then. It’s more like time travel with Helen, like she was sent here from my past.”

Ben nodded, credibly, he hoped. While he felt proud of himself for engaging Hamilton at all, in truth the guy was a little hard to talk to. Spontaneously, half out of desperation and awkwardness, he said, “So is it okay if I ask you something? It’s completely within the walls of this house. I know you don’t know me, but believe me, I wouldn’t want to betray Helen’s trust again.” That last word just slipped out, but Hamilton didn’t seem to notice. “Why are you here? What are we hiding you from?”

The muscles in Hamilton’s face worked a little bit, almost randomly, as if the rum were beginning to wake him up. “I think I had kind of a psychotic break,” he said glumly. “I did something that— I was going to say ‘that wasn’t really like me,’ but that’s just it, actually. I think it was the real me. And the rest of the time — like right now — I just have this face that I put on. I did something that showed me who I am. Now I can’t unsee it.”

That made even more sense to Ben than Hamilton might have expected, and he didn’t say anything in reply. He held his glass to his mouth until the ice cubes slid and clacked against his teeth. “You know what?” he said, taking Hamilton’s glass from him again. “I take it back. It’s your business. I know what I need to know.”

Just then he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket: another text from Helen. “She’s asking if you’re okay,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“So she hasn’t found Bettina?”

Ben didn’t know what that meant, or what an answer one way or the other might do to Hamilton’s mood. So he just shrugged noncommittally, and then he texted back to Helen, Napping . “So how long have you been a client of Helen’s?” he said. “I have to admit, I’m not sure what kind of work she does exactly.”

“I’m not a client of hers.”

“No? Oh. I guess I misunderstood — I thought this was a work-related thing.”

“Not so much,” Hamilton said.

“Did you meet professionally?”

“No,” Hamilton said. “I mean I wouldn’t call it that.”

“And you didn’t stay in touch over the years, or anything like that?”

Hamilton shook his head.

“Why did you call her of all people when you were in trouble, then?” Ben asked. “Just out of curiosity.”

For once, Hamilton met his eyes. “That is a really interesting question, man,” he said. “When I met her again, it reminded me right away of the nuns, right, at our old school? I mean nothing personal, I’m not calling her a nun, I know she used to be your wife. But I got that nun hit off her, where you kind of wanted to laugh them off because they seemed so out of touch, but then when you got scared or in trouble you caught yourself thinking about them. Hey, I guess I do remember some of that Malloy stuff after all.”

Ben stood up and began mixing them two more drinks, even though the orange juice was now gone.

“She is a trip,” Hamilton said. “I totally get why you couldn’t stay married to her. Hey, can I ask you something? That Chinese girl that was here — that’s Helen’s daughter, so I guess she would be your daughter too?”

“That’s right,” Ben said. “Sara.”

“Is she from China China?” Ben nodded. “So you went over there to the orphanage and all that?”

“We went over there,” Ben said, “but not to the orphanage. They didn’t want us to see it.”

“So has it been awkward, ever?”

“Has what been awkward?”

“Having a child who’s a different race than you,” Hamilton said. “I always wondered that about adoption. I mean I guess I’ve always assumed that it was basically vanity that made people reproduce in the first place, and adopting a kid who looks nothing like you — it doesn’t seem like it would satisfy that. Am I wrong?”

Ben’s phone vibrated again. That Hamilton plainly had no sense of this question as rude or invasive said a lot, Ben felt, about the kind of life such people led. “The whole adoption almost fell through, actually, at a couple of stages,” he said, “and at the time, I was ready to live without it. It was Helen whose heart would have been broken. I don’t think out of vanity. Do you? Anyway, it’s got fuck-all to do with what they look like. You give them a life, and then they grow up and start calling you on your shit. You could maybe use one yourself.” Out the kitchen window he saw a Sears truck inching along Meadow Close from house to house, looking, he was sure, for his street number. It was either the rugs or the bookshelves, but in any case, Hamilton was going to have to be shut back in the bedroom for a while. Ben sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, also new, so new it still felt stiff underneath him. “You know what?” he said. “We’re going a little crazy locked up in here. Maybe later if we get in the car and drive out toward, say, Saugerties, get you like a baseball cap or something, I bet we can stay under the radar. I’ll do all the driving. We’ll find someplace to eat dinner and just sit and not say anything.”