T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

I bought Jimmy a drink, watched myself in the mirror behind the bar. I didn’t look like anybody I knew, but there I was, slouched over my elbows and a fresh drink, taking in air and letting it seep back out again. The woman with the deep-dredged laugh was gone. A couple in their twenties had settled into the vacant spot on the other side of Jimmy, oblivious to the drama that had just played out here, the woman perched on the barstool while the man stood in place, rocking in her arms to the beat of the music. The band featured a harp player, and he moved round the confines of the stage like a caged animal, riffling the notes till he went all the way from despair to disbelief and back again, the bass player leaning in as if to brace himself, the guitar rising up slow and mournful out of the stew of the backbeat.

“Hey, don’t feel sorry for me,” Jimmy said. “I’m out here in California having the time of my life.” He pointed a finger at the rain-streaked window. “All this sun really cheers me up.”

I don’t know why I asked — I was drunk, I guess, feeling maudlin, who knows? — but I said, “You got a place to stay tonight?”

He looked into the shot glass as if he might discover a motel key at the bottom of it. “I’m on sabbatical,” he said. “Or on leave, actually. I was staying with my brother — up on Olive Mill? — but he got to be a pain in the ass. Caroline couldn’t take it. She’s back in New York. At least, I think she is.”

“Hard luck,” I said, just to say something.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “sure, and that’s the long and the short of it. But I tell you, I clean up real nice, and what I plan to do is pick up one of these spare women here, like that one over there — the dye job looks like she just crawled out of a coffin? She’ll take me home with her, what you want to bet? And what you want to bet she’s got a shower, maybe even a Jacuzzi?”

I didn’t want to bet anything. I wanted another drink, that was all. And after that, I wanted to have maybe one more, at this place up the street I’d been to a couple of times, just to see what was happening, because it was Saturday night and you never knew.

A WEEK LATER — it was the next Friday, actually — I went into a place down at the marina for cocktails with a woman I’d almost picked up after I left Jimmy at the steakhouse the previous Saturday. Her name was Steena, she was five-ten, blond, and just getting over a major breakup with a guy named Steve whose name dropped from her lips with the frequency of a speech impediment. She’d agreed to “have a drink” with me, and though I’d hoped for more, I had to assume, after we’d had two glasses each of Piper-Heidsieck at twelve and a half dollars per and a plate of oysters, that I wasn’t her type either. The whole time she kept glancing at her watch, and finally her cell phone rang and she got up from the table and went out into the anteroom to take the call. It was Steve. She was sorry, but he wanted to meet her later, for dinner, and he sounded so sad and heartbroken and shot through with misery and contrition she couldn’t refuse. I had nothing to say. I just stared at her, the plate of desecrated oysters between us. “So,” she said, hovering over the table as if she were afraid to sit back down, “I guess I’m going to have to say goodbye. It’s been nice, though. Really.”

I paid the waitress and moved up to the bar, idly watching the Lakers go through their paces with the sound muted and gazing out the window on the pale bleached forest of the ships’ masts gathered there against the night. I was drinking brandy and water, picking through a bowl of artificial snack food and waiting for something to happen, when I ran into the other man I wanted to tell you about. Shaq’s monumental head loomed up on the screen and then faded away again, and I turned around and there he was, just settling into the seat beside me. For a minute I thought he was Jimmy — he had the same hangdog look, the rangy height, the air of an athlete gone to seed — and it gave me a start, because the last thing I needed the way I was feeling was another bout of one-way commiseration. He nodded a greeting, then looked up at the screen. “What’s the score?”

“The Lakers are killing them,” I said. “I think. I’m pretty sure, anyway.” But this was Jimmy, had to be, Jimmy all dressed up and with his hair combed and looking satisfied with himself. It was then that I remembered the brother. “You wouldn’t be Jimmy’s brother, would you?” I said. “By any chance?”

“ Whose brother?”

I felt foolish then. Obviously Jimmy hadn’t given me his real name, and why would he? The alcohol bloomed in my brain, petals unfolding like a rosebud in time-lapse photography. “It’s nothing,” I said, “I just thought…” and let it die. I went back to watching the game. Helped myself to the artificial snacks. Had another brandy and water. After a while the man beside me ordered dinner at the bar, and I got into a conversation about recycling and the crime of waste with a startled-looking woman and her martini-fueled husband. Gradually, the bar filled up. The startled-looking woman and her husband went in to dinner and somebody else took their place. Nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing. I was thinking I should move on, pick up a pizza, some take-out, make it an early night, and I could envision myself standing at the supercharged counter of Paniagua’s Pizza Palace, where you could get two slices with chorizo and jalapeños for three dollars and fifty cents, but instead I found myself turning to the man on my left. “You do have a brother, though, right?” I said.

He gave me a long, slow, deliberate look, then shrugged. “What, does he owe you money?”

So we talked about Jimmy, Jimmy’s tragedy, Jimmy’s refusal to accept facts and the way Jimmy was running hard up against the sharp edges of the world and was sure to wind up in a coffin just like his father before him and his son too if he didn’t get himself into rehab as his number one priority. Then we talked about me, but I didn’t reveal much, and then it was general subjects, the look of the people on TV as opposed to the look of the flesh-and-blood people sitting at the tables at our feet like an undiscovered tribe, and then, inevitably, we came back to alcohol. I told him of some of my escapades, he told me of his. I was probably on my sixth or seventh brandy and water when we got back as far as our mutual childhoods lived mutually under the shadow of booze, though on opposite coasts. The brother was in an expansive mood, his wife and six-year-old daughter gone for the weekend to a Little Miss pageant in Sacramento, and the four walls of his house — or eight or sixteen or however many there were — inadequate to contain him. I took a sip of my drink and let him fly.

He was three years older than Jimmy, and they had two other brothers and a sister, all younger. They moved around a lot as kids, but one winter they were living out in the country in Dutchess County, at the junction of two blacktop roads where there were a handful of summer cabins that had been converted to cheap year-round housing, a two-pump gas station where you could get milk, bread and Coke in the eight-ounce bottle, and a five-stool roadhouse with a jukebox and a griddle called the Pine-Top Tavern. The weather turned nasty, their father was out of work and about a month from bailing out for good, and neither of their parents left the tavern for more than a shower or a shave or to put a couple cans of chicken broth in a saucepan and dump a handful of rice and sliced wieners in on top of it so the kids would have something to eat. Jimmy’s brother had a cough that wouldn’t go away. Their little sister had burned her arm on the stove trying to make herself a can of tomato soup and the brother had to change her bandage twice a day and rub ointment into the exfoliated skin. Jimmy spent his time out in the weed-blistered lot behind the house, kicking a football as close to vertical as he could, over and over again, then slanting off to retrieve it before it could hit the ground. Their dog — Gomer, named after the TV character — had been killed crossing the road on Christmas Eve, and their father blamed one of the drunks leaving the tavern, but nobody did anything about it.