Alice McDermott - After This

She had studied her own young face, blotched with weeping, in the bathroom mirror. Terrible things were ahead of her: Jacob would go to Vietnam. Her father’s surgery had made him an old man. And how would she bear the empty world without her mother in it? There was college to look forward to, boyfriends, marriage, maybe children of her own, but terrible things, too, were attached to any future. What you needed, she thought, was Susan’s ability, her courage, to fix your eyes on the point at which the worst things would be over, gotten through. But what an effort it took.

Susan’s baby, she thought, might be better off, after all, never to have been born.

And then she had cried twenty minutes more.

“I’m over it now, sort of,” she told Susan, laughing at herself. “But I really lost it.”

Susan said faintly, “I guess I’ll have to read it.” In all her calculations about what to do, about running away, telling her parents, leaving school, driving to the golf course and throwing herself into his arms, she had not considered dying in childbirth. The baby dead, too. She wasn’t even sure if such things happened anymore. Although she knew the words “even death” had appeared somewhere this morning, on something she’d signed.

Annie pulled some paper napkins from the steel dispenser and held them under her eyes. “Don’t,” she said, laughing. “Spare yourself. You can copy my summary when it’s due.” Then she straightened her spine, threw back her head. She balled the napkins in her hand. “What is wrong with these people? These nuns?” It was an old refrain, but it comforted, somehow, returned them to the time before today. “What is wrong with our school?” It was their friendship’s eternal question. “Why do they pick these depressing books?”

Susan smiled, knowing the tune. “That bridge thing,” she offered.

“God, yes,” Annie cried. “ San Luis Rey. What was the point of that?” She held out her hands. “ Ethan Frome. ”

“Oh, God.” Susan had a napkin to her eye as well. “When they crashed their sled into the tree.”

“Nice,” Annie said.

“Uplifting,” Susan added. It was their old routine. Oh, Mr. Gallagher.

“And the end of Great Gatsby ” Annie said. “The blood in the pool from where he’s shot in the head.”

“And then that other guy,” Susan said, warming to it, “in the poem, who goes home and shoots himself.”

“Miniver Cheevy,” Annie said. “And Anna Karenina. ”

Susan shook her head. “Couldn’t read it.”

Annie leaned across her plate, emphasizing the words. “She throws herself under a train.”

Susan laughed once, like a cough.

“Madame Bovary !” Annie said.

“Dead, too?”

She nodded. “After about a million affairs.”

Susan shook her head. “Well, of course,” she said. “Sex and death. That’s the message.”

Annie threw the balled-up napkins onto the table. “Christ,” she said, “what is wrong with them? Why do these crazy women want us to read such depressing things?”

“They want us to suffer,” Susan said, sarcastic so that Annie wouldn’t see how much she wanted to cry. “They want us to be afraid.”

“They want us to be nuns,” Annie added, so she wouldn’t have to say, Oh, Susan, oh, my poor friend.

In college, Michael Keane was given to saying that if they were not exactly the middle children born at mid-century to middle-class parents and sent from middling, mid-island high schools to mediocre colleges all across the state, they were close enough. They were out to be teachers, most of them-industrial or liberal arts the predominant goals since any interest in science or math portended better things: accounting, engineering, med school in Mexico.

Damien’s, where they drank, was not, as Michael Keane liked to say, in the most felicitous part of town: it was an ugly, desolate old house tucked among ugly, snowplow-ravaged streets that were themselves lined with more narrow, sagging houses, bent fences, scrawny trees. There was a sorry-looking baseball field across the street and the edge of a cemetery off the abandoned lot behind. The black skeleton of an old power plant rose up in the far distance, over the field, and you couldn’t get to the place without feeling three, four, maybe five times the rutted thump and bump of abandoned railroad tracks under your wheels. But by their junior years most of them had had enough of the storefront bars on Main Street, the bars along the river and at the lake, the roadhouses and beer barns out past the fraternities. In the paucity of streetlight and house light that surrounded Damien’s, the place could easily be missed-there was only a bit of red neon in the window-and the joke was that you couldn’t find it unless you knew where it was. Knowing where it was brought all of them that much closer to what they thought of as the real life of the city. As did knowing Ralph.

He was in his early forties. Lean, a little stooped, a little paunchy. He lived on the second floor of the old house, above the bar. The house itself had once been a funeral parlor. Then a speakeasy. Then, and currently, a dive. Stories that were told about Ralph Damien said that he had dropped out of three colleges before joining the army. And turned down an offer to attend Oxford after beating the “head guy” at chess in a London pub. And accepted another to service a society matron in Saratoga Springs when he was nineteen. He wore his dark hair long at a time when most middle-aged men still didn’t, and had a drooping mustache at a time when every college student who could did too. He was languid and sarcastic and worldly-wise, a source for pot and hash as well as for beer and schnapps and tequila-for cheap stereo equipment, sometimes; sometimes for a stash of watches, commemorative gold coins, leather jackets; once for sealed boxes of Chanel No. 5 to take home to your mother.

Like Michael, most of them who hung out at Damien’s were juniors and seniors. Most of them had done at least one semester of student teaching in some smelly local school-in their dress pants and button-downs and ratty, poorly knotted ties. Most of them had a pretty clear idea of what the next few years were going to be like.

But stop into Damien’s at four o’clock in the afternoon with a cold rain falling, and there would be Ralph, a joint burning in an ashtray on the bar, the newspaper spread before him. He’d open the refrigerator in the back room to show off a dozen choice sirloins wrapped in white butcher paper-payback for a favor he’d done someone. He’d berate, leisurely and with a cool amusement, some perspiring liquor salesman in a cheap suit and a hunting jacket who was trying to sell him piss for beer. He’d hunker down at a side table with a pair of locals, his thumb to his jaw, his ringers splayed across his cheek and then rise, laughing, slapping backs. He’d be in Aruba over Christmas, he’d tell the college kids, great little hotel, great little woman waiting for him there, the color of caramel. At ten or eleven on a weekend night, he’d ask, “Anyone want to pump beer for a while?” And then step out from behind the bar to slip his arm around the waist of the woman or the girl who had been waiting on a corner bar stool. He’d bend down first for an openmouthed kiss and then, with his thumb slipped behind her belt, walk her to the stairs.

It never occurred to Michael Keane, to any of them, it seemed, to wonder what women saw in Ralph Damien, this middle-aged townie with his low-slung jeans and paunch and long hair (and-after the Christmas in Aruba-a diamond earring at a time when no middle-aged men, no men they knew of, wore one). The hours Michael had already spent in those green-walled classrooms had given him his own pretty clear idea of what the next few years would be like, but he wasn’t quite ready to believe that he’d be there, polyester dress slacks, frayed button-down, knotted tie, at thirty-five or forty. Better to imagine vaguely a life like Ralph’s, to imitate his weary smile, his cool squint, his way of palming the cash register or the beer pull. His nonchalance when he returned from upstairs with the girl in tow and either threw on the lights for last call or bought shots all around, or just took up one of his own bar stools for the rest of the night, the girl’s hips in his hands, her rump pressed firmly between his skinny legs.