Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

You would think I’d have dreamed about Dorothy, but I didn’t. The closest I came to it was the whiff of isopropyl alcohol that I hallucinated from time to time as I finally drifted off again. She had carried that scent home on her skin at the end of every workday. Early in our marriage I used to have vivid dreams about childhood doctor visits and vaccinations and the like, evoked by the alcohol scent as I lay sleeping next to her. Now the ghost of it brought me sharply awake, and once or twice I even spoke her name aloud: “Dorothy?”

But I never got an answer.

The casseroles started thinning out and the letters stopped. Could people move on that easily? Yes, well, of course. New tragedies happened daily. I had to acknowledge that.

It seemed heartless that I should think to go in for my semiannual dental checkup, but I did. And then I bought myself some new socks. Socks, of all things! So trivial! But all my old ones had holes in the toes.

One evening my friend Nate called — WEISS N I on my caller ID. Him I picked up for. Right off I said, “Nate! How’ve you been?” without waiting for him to announce himself. But that was evidently a mistake, because I caught a brief hesitation before he said, “Hello, Aaron.” Very low-voiced, very lugubrious; not at all his usual style.

“How about a game tomorrow?” I asked him.

“Pardon?”

“A game of racquetball! I’m turning into an old man here. All my joints are rusting.”

“Well, ah, but … I was calling to invite you to dinner,” he said.

“Dinner?”

“Yes, Sonya was saying we ought to have you over.”

Sonya must be his wife. I had never met his wife. I suppose he must have mentioned her from time to time, but we didn’t have that kind of friendship. We had a racquetball friendship. We’d gotten acquainted at the gym.

I said, “Over to … to your house, you mean?”

“Right.”

“Well, gosh, Nate, I don’t know. I don’t even know where you live!”

“I live in Bolton Hill,” he said.

“And also I just … It’s been really busy at work lately. You wouldn’t believe how busy. I barely have time for a sandwich, and then, when I do find time, there is so much extra food in the fridge, these — these — these casseroles and these … cheesecakes. It’s practically a full-time job just to g-g-get it all d-d-d — just to eat it!”

“I see,” he said.

“But thanks.”

“That’s okay.”

“Tell Sonya I appreciate the thought.”

“Okay.”

I wanted to revisit the racquetball idea, but after I’d made such a point of being busy I figured that would be a mistake. So I just told him goodbye.

Not half an hour later, the phone rang again. This time it was TULL L. I answered, but I was warier now. All I said was, “Hello?”

“Hi, Aaron, it’s Luke.”

“Hi, Luke.”

“I can understand why you might prefer not to go to Nate’s.”

“Excuse me?”

“He told me you’d turned down his invitation.”

I said, “You’re talking about Nate Weiss.”

“Why, yes.”

“You know Nate Weiss?”

“We met in the hospital waiting room, remember? When we both stopped by to visit.”

This had been happening a lot lately. I swear I had no recollection that either one of them had stopped by, let alone that they’d met each other. But I said, “Oh. Right.”

“He says he got the impression you’re not up yet for coming to dinner.”

“No, but racquetball …” I said. “I’m itching for a good game of racquetball.”

There was a pause. Then Luke said, “Unfortunately, I don’t know how to play racquetball.”

“Oh.”

“But I was thinking: if getting together with wives and such is too much to handle just now—”

“ Oh , no. Lord , no,” I said briskly. “Doesn’t faze me in the least.”

Another pause. Then he said, “I was thinking you could come to the restaurant instead.”

He meant his restaurant, which was how we’d been introduced, back in the era of The Beginner’s Book of Dining Out . I said, “Well, that’s a good idea, Luke. Maybe sometime in the—”

“Just you and me and Nate; just us guys. No wives. We could have an early supper, and then you could head on home whatever time you felt like. How about it?”

I didn’t want to do that, either, but what could I say? It was nice of him to make the effort. It was nice of both of them. I doubted I would have done as much if I had been in their place. I was more the “Let’s move on” type. The “Maybe if I don’t mention your loss, you’ll forget it ever happened” type.

I kind of wished they were that type, to be honest.

But okay: might as well get this over with. I met them directly after work the next evening, a rainy, blowy Tuesday in mid-September. It had been pouring all day, and driving conditions were terrible. On top of that, I had trouble finding a parking space. By the time I walked into the restaurant (white linens, wide-planked floors, a certain worn-around-the-edges friendliness), Nate and Luke were already seated at a table. They made an unlikely pair. Nate looked very sleek and dark and professional in his black lawyer-suit, whereas Luke was one of those all-one-color, beige-hair-beige-skin types in shabby khakis, going a little soft around the middle. They seemed to be having no trouble finding things to talk about, though, if you judged by the way they’d set their heads together. I had the distinct impression that it was me they were talking about. How to deal with me, what topics would be safe to discuss with me. I’d barely pulled my chair out before Nate asked, “What about this weather , hey?” in a sprightly tone I wasn’t familiar with. And Luke rode right over the tail of that with “You been following the Orioles?”

I felt compelled to answer in kind, in a louder voice than usual and with more verve. “You know, I haven’t as a matter of fact been following the Orioles lately,” I said, and then I wanted to take the words back, because I knew they’d be misinterpreted.

Sure enough: Nate said, “Well, of course you haven’t. You’ve had a lot more important things to think about.”

“No, I just meant—”

“Both of you should try the oysters!” Luke broke in. “We’re in the R months now!”

Luke was such a quiet man ordinarily that it was bizarre to see him so animated. Besides which, he clearly felt uneasy sitting idle in his own workplace. He kept glancing around at other tables, raising his eyebrows significantly at waiters, frowning over Nate’s head in the direction of the kitchen. “I personally recommend eating these raw,” he told me in a distracted way, “but if you prefer, you could order the, uh …,” and then he paused to listen to what a short man in a stained apron was whispering in his ear.

“… the Oysters Rockefeller,” Nate finished for him. “Those are great. They use this special slab bacon that comes from upstate New York.”

“You’ve eaten here before?” I asked.

“Yes, we came by last week,” he said, and then he gave a little grimace, which I couldn’t figure out for a moment. Was it because he had let it slip that he and Luke had met earlier, perhaps to cogitate over The Aaron Problem? No, on second thought it must have been the “we” that had embarrassed him, because next he said, as if correcting himself, “I had thought after I met him that I’d like to try his food.”

So apparently the plan tonight was to avoid all mention of wives. Pretend neither one of them even possessed a wife. For now Luke, turning back to us as the aproned man left, said, “Sorry, the chef has run out of lamb chops, is all,” and I happened to know that he was married to the chef. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have said that Jane or Joan or whatever her name was had run out of lamb chops, and he might also have brought her out to introduce her. But these were not ordinary circumstances.