Andrew Fox: Over Our Heads

‘Go ’way, you,’ Stephen said. ‘We’re not queers, we’re —’

‘Old friends.’ I waved the kid away. ‘I was about to go for a walk in the park, actually,’ I told Stephen, eager for any company at all and curious as to what his company might mean. ‘Interested?’

He looked beyond me, deep into Fifth Avenue. I followed his gaze and saw a mob of shoppers and a tangle of traffic squeezed between glass buildings and shrouded in silver steam.

‘Sure,’ he stroked his dark stubble. ‘Herself is working around the corner but I’m not picking her up for a while yet.’

We beat a cab off the line and, passing through the cloud of doughy sweetness wafting from a churro stand, made for the entrance to the park. I tried to see in Stephen some of my old excitement about the city, but he walked with the same languid economy as ever; even with my limp it was no struggle to match his pace. Growing up, I’d understood his listless stride as expressing comfort in his surroundings, but now it made him seem stubborn and incurious. As we walked he told me his story: laid off from the garage where he’d worked since school; tourist visas they’d already overstayed; a waitress job for her, a construction gig for him; a month-to-month in Elmhurst. I told him about Jeanine, my lack of stag.

‘You poor bastard,’ he said, a little too happily. ‘But what would you have done anyway, what with your … you know?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get that far. Pizza?’

‘Board games? Orange juice? Sounds like the birthday parties we had when we were nine years old.’

I stumbled on a root and checked my fall with an arm around Stephen’s waist. Through his clothes, he was warm and solid.

‘What’s up with you?’ he said.

I told him about the weights I’d been lifting in the run-up to the wedding and the muscle twinge that had laid me up in bed for the past three days.

‘Jesus. You’re falling apart, lad.’

‘Says you, bald as a coot?’

‘I’m not bald, it’s a solar panel for a … what’s the joke?’

‘A sex machine.’

‘So, come here to me, did you at least get any good meds out of it?’

I took the pill bottle from my inside pocket and passed it to him. He squinted at the label, unscrewed the cap and shook a pill into the palm of his hand. He brought the hand to his lips and passed the bottle back. I pocketed it again.

‘Are you not having one as well?’

‘I’m pacing myself.’

We walked in silence along the mossy bank of a duck pond, below street level and hemmed in by trees. Water moved in slow ripples to the bank. Old men sitting on benches tore up loaves of bread.

‘So, how’s herself?’ I said, to get it out of the way.

‘She’s grand.’ Stephen reached out a hand and watched himself turn it over in the breeze.

We stopped at the crest of the bridge to lean against the wall. Its stone was scored and eaten, its grooves crusted with seed pods. In the water, the buildings of Central Park South reached down towards a failing sun. In the distance, rocks like the backs of whales jutted from the park’s green surface, above them the vivid leaves and the grey filigree of branches. I thought I could smell on Stephen the compound of soap and old apples that would always be his mother’s house.

‘So, let me ask you,’ he said, ‘why really did you … you know?’

Often, in the years since — at the library in Belfield, my cubicle in Citywest or my office in East Midtown — I’d thought of the evening I’d run into Ciara at the pub while Stephen was at work, of our drinking and dreaming aloud about our futures before staggering down towards the beach together. I’d wondered what either of us might have been hoping for. I’d wondered why she’d felt she had to tell him and how he could forgive her but not me. And I’d wondered too where Stephen might be, and what it would be like if we saw each other again. Of course, I’d known that I’d need to have an answer for him. Why didn’t I?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Honestly, Stephen, I am.’

‘Yeah.’

‘No really, that’s something we’re supposed … It’s something I’ve wanted to say.’

‘Lord,’ he spoke through his nose in a rising cadence I remembered from mimicking priests, ‘grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and — shit, what’s the rest of it? The wisdom?’

‘Courage.’

‘The courage to — shit. What?’

‘Change the —’

‘Forget it.’

At our feet, in the breeze, candy wrappers dragged their knuckles against the stone and fingered our ankles. Stephen’s lips parted to shape a word but he didn’t speak. He flicked a pebble from the wall, and we moved off over the bridge. We crossed a running path and cut through a copse of apple blossoms. On a baseball diamond, two Little League teams were playing. The kids wore bright uniforms, orange versus blue. Without discussing it, Stephen and I sat on a rock that gave us a decent view. I thought of truant afternoons by the cliffs, bottles of strong cider in our schoolbags. The orange team’s pitcher stamped the dirt and squinted at the catcher’s signals. The wind-up was brief, the pitch itself a blur. The ball slammed into the catcher’s mitt as the batter swung at air. The pitcher’s mother, a sinewy woman not much older than us, nodded slowly and clapped just once, while other parents, clustered on the bleachers, twisted the corners of their mouths.

‘There’s always one like that, isn’t there?’ Stephen said.

‘Like what?’

‘Like it’s a law of the universe or something. Put any group of kids together and one’ll always stand out head and shoulders above the rest. Wouldn’t you think he’d leave off a bit?’

‘I was always shite at sports.’

‘Remember your run?’

‘It’s still my run.’

‘All elbows and high knees. What’d we call you?’

‘The chicken.’

‘The chicken, that’s right.’

Stephen flapped his elbows and squawked, and a few of the parents shot us stony glances until I punched him in the arm to stop. The teams changed over. The blue team’s pitcher was a beanpole whose jersey bunched around his belt. Soon balls were plinking off bats.

‘Come on,’ Stephen said, ‘or I’ll be in trouble.’

He helped me to my feet and we walked to Columbus Circle. A smear of yellow cabs wound around the fountain. High above us, atop his pillar, the stone Genoan stretched a foot into space.

‘Well,’ Stephen said, ‘this was unexpected.’

‘It was good,’ I said. ‘And here, take my number. Give me a shout if you need … if you ever want to.’

He punched into his phone the numbers I recited. I watched him hit ‘Save’ and type the letters of my surname. I took out my phone and waited for him to speak numbers of his own. He looked at it in my hand.

‘Sure, I’ll see you again,’ he said, and I realized that what I’d hoped for was impossible. He thumped me in the biceps and I watched him lope away, thick shoulders rolling as he sought space in the crowd that swallowed him.

A metal globe tilted from a marble plinth beside the subway entrance. Its continents shone, encircled by rings that traced the orbits of things I couldn’t see. I rode the 1 to Ninety-sixth where I ground my teeth as I climbed the steps and the grip of Valium weakened. The wind howled across Broadway edged with the dankness of the river. I stopped at a deli on the corner to buy aspirin, bagels for the morning and, at the register, two new bridal magazines to add to Jeanine’s collection. As I waited for my change, I tried not to listen to the fridges’ hum. Instead I wondered about Stephen and Ciara, and where they might have gone to once he picked her up.