Ted tried to smile, but it wasn’t really a smile. Holly, a tougher proposition, looked at me with a light in her eye. She said, “You’re joking.”
“Yes. I don’t think I’d have shot him in the head. But he coughed before it came to that.”
“Coughed?”
“Confessed.”
“Jesus, Billy, that’s a horrible story,” said Ted.
“He was the horrible guy, not me.”
Holly was looking at me strangely. “You’re a passionate soul.”
“It’s been a while since anyone’s accused me of that,” I said, looking around to find Lucy. She was off in one corner, beneath an oil painting of a lighthouse, a big piece, about twelve feet by four.
“Is that your little girl?” said Holly. She still had a goofy look in her eyes, as if at any moment she was about to ask me what my inner voice was saying. “She’s so full of light. She seems just to breathe it in.”
“Watch her too long and she’ll break your heart. She might of course break your head first. She has a temper.”
Seeing how autonomous Lucy was, knowing how much her own person she’d been, right from birth, almost as if she were my parent, watching over me, rather than the other way around, I was reminded for the hundredth time that she could live without me, a thought that brought both grief and comfort. During the first years of her life there’d been those among our friends who’d seen nothing of me in her. Later, they all agreed, reluctantly, that she’d taken qualities from me as well. I’d taught her persistence, a way of laughing at the world, and, maybe most important, I’d taught her that she deserved to be admired. Like me, she was assured, angry, moody, cautious. At least I used to be that way once — cautious.
“Excuse me,” I said to Ted and Holly, and went over to join her. “So, Luce, tell me what you see.”
“The big light’s reaching out. The sea’s so wild, but the light will guide you across it. It’s scary, a little, but wonderful, like watching lightning from inside the house on a stormy night.”
When Ellen and I were in the middle of the break-up, Lucy had watched E.T. over and over, sitting with her face inches from the screen, believing that she herself was the extraterrestrial and that Ellen and I weren’t in fact her mother and father; her real family would be arriving soon to take her home in a spaceship.
“You watch any football today?”
“Dallas got their butts kicked.”
“Great.”
She and I shared an affection for linemen whose brief glories came when they struggled from the trenches to squash six-million-dollar quarterbacks in the dirt. She turned back to the picture, saying quietly, “Dad, are you going to stop seeing me?”
I blinked, knowing where this came from but shocked, and with no easy reply at hand. The words escaped in a nervous blurt. “Jeez, Luce, you want another Coke or something?”
“I mean, it’s OK if you won’t be able to see me.”
“What kind of a thing is that to say? I’ll always come to see you, wherever you are; you know that.”
“I wondered, that’s all,” she said, very serious, and I was left with a mixture of oppression and anxiety, sadness. Kids know much more than we think; they pick up on atmospheres better than anything else. I remembered it from my own childhood. “You want that Coke?”
From behind came a hubbub, sharp voices, a scuffle, and I turned to see Ted, no longer looking faded or rumpled, though still very drunk. His face was red and his jaws were clenched so tight that a nerve jumped on his cheek. I suddenly noticed how pale and startling his deep-set eyes were; they stood out huge as portholes. He gripped a revolver, two-fisted.
Someone screamed. Others, slower to realize, started laughing and hastened to stuff their mouths with food before they too backed off, leaving Ted in the center of the room by the fountain with Holly and a young Japanese guy who stood at her side. Dressed in black, head shaven, maybe a boyfriend, he was, together with Ted’s sweating, booze-driven rage, the immediate cause of the argument. Ted’s voice was shrill and tense. “You don’t think I invited you here for this, do you? But I’ll do it if you make me. I swear I will.”
I didn’t know if Ted was serious. I didn’t even know if the gun was loaded, though I knew he was drunk enough to pull the trigger. I said in a whisper to Lucy, “We’re leaving. Come on.” I grabbed her coat and walked with her out to the car, where I said, “Stay here, sweetheart; don’t move. Promise? This will only take a minute. Draw me something while I’m gone.”
Back inside, working my way through, I bumped and shoved against those coming the other way. Some had stayed, retreating to the sides of the gallery, or even throwing themselves flat on the floor, from which vantage points they watched Ted, still in the now empty center of the gallery, still holding the gun in Holly’s face, and still talking. The shaven-headed Japanese boy was nowhere to be seen.
The smart thing here was for me to call for back-up. Failing that, I knew I should stand at a distance, gently collect Ted’s attention, and talk him down from this nonsense. Instead, I watched my feet march across the floor, placing me between him and the girl, the gun inches away from my face. “Boy, I must really be flailing here,” I said. “This isn’t what I learned in tactics school at all. Ted — I’m afraid you’re going to have to shoot me.” My voice sounded calm, staring down the barrel of that .357, another piece of grotesque and gleaming machinery. “Give me the weapon. Come on, Ted, before you do something you regret.”
He gazed at me with sweat on his forehead and no interest in his blank oceanic eyes. This was something else I’d learned: a guy was more likely to shoot if he was refusing to make eye contact, or else negligently making too much. Ted came into the latter category. He said in a strained and too-patient voice, “Billy, will you please get the fuck out of the way?”
I was wondering if I dare take the chance and try to knock the thing out of his hand. I was thinking, this gun doesn’t look like it’s ever been used, but then most guns don’t; they never look worn, they don’t have a visible history like other objects. Human life never shows in them; only their ability to take it away.
Someone dropped a glass. The Japanese kid bulled past, dragging Holly with him, and Ted swung the revolver out of my face toward her again. I jumped to keep in the line of fire.
“Billy, oh, Billy,” he said, pressing the barrel straight into my forehead. I felt the metal leave its print. “It’s not you I want to shoot.”
I leaned forward into the barrel until it pressed so deep, Ted himself had to take a step back. “You know what? You’re going to have to. So go ahead and do it. Fuck me up, and yourself. Or else put the gun down, and we’ll do the cha-cha-cha. Because that’s what I’m thinking. I tell you, Ted, as a dance this is a fucking joke.”
Blinking, sweating, baffled, Ted ceased all movement. I thought, “Shit, I’m insane, this guy’s out of control.” Off to my right I heard the fountain as it went on wasting its money.
“Do it, Ted. Pull the trigger. It’ll make you think you’re a man. You won’t be.”
For a second his eyes went all wrong, flicking this way and that. There was a moment when I thought he was going to do it, when my own eyes felt like the only still points in the moving-up-and-down of the rest of me. Everything was quiet before he lowered the revolver, letting it dangle and bang against his knee, and burst into tears. “She left me, man. Suzie left me.”
I took the gun from his unresisting hand and checked