A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“It works.”

She contemplates for a moment. “What about a three-way?”

I shake my head no.

“Not even tempted?”

“Can’t.”

We are in the backyard doing a strange dance: she takes one step towards, I take two steps back; she goes right, I go left.

“I don’t believe you,” she says. And, impulsively, she is on me, knocking me back into a lounge chair.

I see Madeline glance out the kitchen window into the backyard. “Cy,” she screams, ear-piercingly loud. “Man down.”

Like the college linebacker he once was, Cy is out the door and down the steps, charging towards Sofia, like a wrecking ball swinging in from the left. He hits hard, knocking her sideways.

A moment passes; Sofia stands up, dusts herself off, and looks at Cy. “Thank you,” she says, “I must have tripped over a root.” Turning to me she says, “Be in touch,” and then she’s gone.

I text Cheryl and tell her she was right about Sofia. She writes back asking if Sofia suggested a three-way. “Yes, how did you know?”

“She asked me first,” Cheryl types back. “I said it was up to you but that she had to ask.” There’s a pause. “You know me,” she writes. “I’m interested in all kinds of things. …”

Cheryl invites Madeline, Cy, and me to come for dinner later in the week — before heading off for a month in Maine. “A yar-becue,” she types, “yard barbecue, just Ed and the boys.”

Cy and Madeline are excited. “It’s been a long time since we were invited to a dinner party,” Madeline says, and then whispers loudly that after Cy’s fall from grace they were dropped socially by pretty much everyone they knew.

“I didn’t fall from anywhere,” Cy mutters. “I stole some money. It’s more common than you realize.”

Madeline and I make a Jell-O mold — with pineapple chunks suspended in green, mandarine oranges in yellow, and green grapes in red. I’ve never made Jell-O before — it’s magical.

We arrive at Cheryl’s to find the yard thick with smoke and the dense perfume of hot meat.

The three boys, Tad, Brad, and Lad, are helping their father, who is hovering near something that looks like a cross between a fire pit and an antiquarian outhouse.

“We built our own smoker,” Ed says, welcoming us.

“Is that backyard legal?” I ask.

He nods. “Homeowners have rights,” he says.

“I hope your neighbors aren’t vegetarian.”

“I grew up smoking meat,” Ed says. “My father and I would hunt and would dress whatever we killed — fowl, venison, and so on.” Ed claps me on the back. “I miss having a hunting buddy,” he says. “My boys never got into it — maybe that’s something you and I could do?”

“Maybe,” I say, sure that hunting with my sex-tress’s husband is a bad idea.

We sit down to dinner. I’ve got Madeline and Cy one on each side of me; Tad, Brad, and Lad take the other side of the picnic table, their swelling frames threatening to tip the balance entirely. The boys pass bowls of potato salad, coleslaw, and corn bread while Ed opens the smoker, nearly asphyxiating us all.

“You made all of this?”

Ed and Cheryl both nod. “We like to do it ourselves.”

Everything is delicious, beyond pleasant, nearly heavenly. “I don’t know how you do it,” I say to Ed, when Cheryl is away from the table clearing plates. “I’m a lucky man, Har,” he says, having coined a new nickname for me — Har. “Cheryl and me, we get each other — the good and the bad. Life is long, what’s the point of being judgmental? I don’t have any hard, fast rules — be happy, enjoy.”

And I can’t figure out if Ed is a genius or a moron.

Cheryl comes back with our Jell-O mold decanted onto a plate — shaking like a fat lady — and the boys bring out a tub of homemade peppermint ice cream.

We dig in, and all is good until Cy asks for a third helping, and then, when he’s done, remembers that he’s horribly lactose-intolerant, and we make a mad dash for home.

Despite the summer heat, the ninety-degree days, Madeline and Cy are always cold; they wear cardigans, inside and out. I extract the old window screens from the basement, put them in, and skip turning on the air conditioning. It is like a summer from the past: the heat builds during the day. Tessie lies on the tile floor in the front hall, panting; in the afternoon there are thunderstorms, and at night there’s the melancholy tap-tapping sounds of bugs on the screens.

It’s near the end of July; everything is elongated, made languid and slow-motion by the heat. Madeline and Cy retreat into a world of long ago. There is something beautiful about their slowly evaporating ghostlike narration, which shows marks of revision, erasure, and locked doors — events long ago put away.

I take them to concerts at the bandshell in the park and watch them dance across the lawn like it is thirty years ago.

“What’s your secret to a long marriage?” I ask Madeline one morning.

“We don’t burden each other with our feelings,” she says. “A woman friend of mine called it staying in the dance.”

“The dance?”

“Of courtship. When you are courting, you are your best self, but then, too often, we devolve and reveal our worst selves. Why would you want the person you live with to wake up seeing your worst self every day?”

One day, when Cy is annoyed at one of the babies from South Africa, he fires him, tells him to “box it up and get out. There’s no future for you here, sitting around thinking it’s going to come right to you. It doesn’t work that way, buster. I don’t want to see you around here anymore,” he says.

“That’s not your baby,” Madeline says, grabbing the plastic infant from him. “That one is mine.”

“Mine,” Cy says, surprisingly possessive, grabbing the baby back.

Just as I’m thinking I’ll have to intervene, they make up.

“Fine,” Cy says, annoyed. He looks the baby square in the eye. “I’ll give you another chance, but don’t blow it.” From then on, Cy walks around carrying the baby under his arm — sideways, like a football. He takes it pretty much everywhere, calling it his brown brother and occasionally his wife.

I give myself until the children come home to finish the book. I set up shop on an old card table in the attic — surrounding myself with box fans that create windy white noise. I weigh down my papers with rocks from the garden. I find the heat inspiring, like being in a boxing gym. Stripped to a pair of gym shorts, I type as rivulets of sweat trickle down my face, the meaty smell of myself ripening pushing me to work harder — ready or not, it needs to be over.

Using a sharp blade to crack the old paint off, I pop open the small window up in the eaves. The glass is wavy; the view doused in rainbow-reflected light makes everything look better than it is. I move about cautiously, careful not to bump my head on the beams. There are things up there from long ago, a World War II uniform, old teddy bears, an ancient crib that I dust off and bring down to Madeline, who immediately takes it and sets up a nursery by her side of the bed for the babies.

The phrase “while you were sleeping” takes on new meaning as I plow through the pages from the past fifteen years, noticing that everything I’ve written is couched in a protective tone, hemming and hawing, positing and pulling back. Time to rip out the stops — fuck it. Dick Nixon was the American man of that moment, swimming in the bitter supposition that for everyone else things came easily. He was the perfect storm of present, past, and future, of integrity and deceit, of moral superiority and arrogance, of the drug that was and is the American Dream, wanting more, wanting to have what someone else has, wanting to have it all.